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France Télécom dominated the international markets this week with its $16.4bn equivalent multi-currency blockbuster - the largest ever corporate bond. The transaction comprised euro, dollar and sterling tranches across a range of maturities from two to 30 years, and attracted some $34bn of orders. Overwhelming demand for the bond drove spreads on all the tranches tighter, most significantly in the long dated dollar and seven year euro tranche which contracted by some 10bp to 12bp.

Who cooked Joe's goose? This was the question being asked in every City bar and speakeasy following speculation that grizzled Euromarket veteran and bus-pass holder, Joe Cook, is no longer firmly on his perch at JP Morgan Chase. What went wrong for Joe? Why did his long ride on the Euromarket gravy-train hit the buffers? For more than 20 years we have never been able to discover exactly what Joe did, but at Orion Bank (very RIP) and dithering JP Morgan, that was never considered to be a career problem.

Merrill Lynch is expected to launch the ¥30bn five year global Samurai for the Central Bank of Tunisia today (Friday). Pricing, which is expected to be around 160bp over yen Libor, has been criticised by bankers at rival houses in Japan. The bond repeats the novel structure employed by Merrill when the bank led Tunisia's last yen deal - a ¥50bn two tranche 10 and 30 year bond, which was listed with both the US SEC and Japan's ministry of finance.

Morgan Grenfell Private Equity has emerged as the favourite in the contest for Whitbread’s pub estate, after bids went in on Friday March 9. The venture capitalist is believed to have entered a period of exclusivity with the seller.

* Stephen Heard has left JP Morgan Chase, where he was head of fixed income bond sales, to join BNP Paribas as head of sales to UK and Middle Eastern institutional clients. The UK and Middle East group used to include interest rates and relative values specialists but they are being split off.

National Rural Utilities Cooperative Finance Corp has increased the debt ceiling of its debt issuance programme from $2 billion to $4 billion. The programme, which was signed in February 1998, has $1 billion outstanding off six trades. The facility is rated A1 by Moody's and AA- by Standard & Poor's. The dealer panel is made up of the arranger, JP Morgan, ABN Amro, Lehman Brothers and Tokyo-Mitsubishi International.

The Neuer Markt celebrates its fourth birthday this weekend, and its participants are praying for some good presents. The secondary market still looks extremely volatile, but banks continue to launch issues and hope investors can be persuaded to part with their cash. The Nemax 50 performance index recovered strongly at the beginning of the week from a staggering all-time low of 1,789.52, but then fell 3.7% yesterday (Thursday) to close at 1,991. To make matters worse, a second company on the Neuer Markt filed for insolvency, and shareholders in flagship company Intershop initiated legal action in the US.

Denmark Danish satellite equipment manufacturer Thrane & Thrane generated enough interest in its Eu38m IPO to price in the middle of the range this week. The deal, managed by Carnegie, was three times oversubscribed despite the dismal equity markets.

* GMAC International Finance BV Guarantor: General Motors Acceptance Corp

Nordea has signed banks into a Eu105m five year multi-currency revolver for Finnish company Elcoteq Network Corporation.

A number of German mortgage banks are looking to enter the Pfandbrief market in the near future, market sources say.

The Eu20m 364 day term loan for Parex Bank, arranged by Standard Bank, has been launched. It is the second syndicated loan for Parex Bank since the Russian crisis in 1998.