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This chart, provided by Citibank/Salomon Smith Barney Inc., tracks bid-ask prices for par credit facilities that trade in the secondary market. It also tracks facility amounts, ratings, pricing and maturities.

Piedmont Capital Management Associates is looking to add some $15 million to corporate bonds in sectors such as utilities and Baby Bell telecommunications companies. Walter Campbell, portfolio manager of $150 million in taxable fixed income, says the move would be a bid to capture yield in areas of the market that have been beaten up relative to their historical performance and that of U.S. government securities. Piedmont would fund the purchases with cash from callable agencies when they are called. As a trigger for the trade, Campbell is waiting for a sell-off in corporate bonds. If spreads remain more or less unchanged, he will add only $7.5 million in corporates and put the rest back into callable agencies. Campbell says he prefers callable to non-callable agencies because they offer more yield.

Ares Management, the Los Angeles based asset management shop associated with Apollo Advisors, is in the market with a new collateralized loan obligation and is also in the process of raising a distressed debt and growth private equity fund in the region of $750 million to $1 billion. Ares is raising the debt for its fifth CLO, called Ares VII, according to a portfolio manager familiar with the CDO market. The shop has nearly $3 billion in assets under management, including more than $1.2 billion in bank loan assets.

Deutsche Bank,Citibank and Morgan Stanley pitched Moore Corp.'s $850 million acquisition facility to investors last week with a $500 million "B" loan priced at LIBOR plus 23/ 4%. The deal backs Moore's $1.3 billion merger with Wallace Computer Services to form one of the world's largest providers of print management services.

Bank of America shifted the tranche sizes and juiced up pricing and security for its $350 million facility for Central Parking. The seven-year "B" piece is now set at $175 million with a spread of 523 basis points over LIBOR with a 25 basis point upfront fee, according to a banker. The "B" was formerly $150 million and priced at LIBOR plus 31/ 4%. The five-year revolver is now $175 million with an unchanged LIBOR plus 21/ 4% rate. The revolver was previously $200 million. Additionally, the deal is secured by collateral now, rather than stock secured with a springing lien as it was originally. A B of A official declined to comment.

Advent Capital, a New York-based money manager with $1.7 billion mostly in convertible bonds, has hired Les Levi to manage and expand its high-yield asset pool. Levi left J.P. Morgan Securities late last year. He was a managing director focusing on high-yield bonds and loan origination. Prior to that, he ran the firm's high-yield telecom and media research group. Levi says he took the newly created position to work on the buy-side. He reports jointly to Odell Lambroza, a senior portfolio manager, and Tracy Maitland, Advent's ceo and founder. A call to Lambroza was not returned.

Many fixed-income professionals are not convinced that newly annointed nationally recognized statistic rating organization (NRSRO) Dominion Bond Rating Service, which has 41 analysts compared to 800 at Moody's Investors Service and 1000 at Standard & Poor's, will be a factor in the market. Tom Parker, a high-yield portfolio manager at Barclays Global Investors, argues that the ratings agencies have run into trouble in recent years because they judge the creditworthiness of a company according to its market cap. Enron and WorldCom proved that bigger is not better when an economic bubble bursts and you don't have any earnings, he says. "How does Dominion change this? The answer is it doesn't," Parker says. "The agencies still have the same problem. How do you adjust to an environment where size isn't the key variable? Adding five other independent ratings agencies doesn't change that either."

Abbey National will use securitization as part of its effort to dispose of its nearly £40 billion bond portfolio, says an Abbey insider. Some of the bonds will be packaged into collateralized debt obligations, he says. The U.K. bank has announced its intention to exit wholesale banking and concentrate on its retail business. In addition, the bank will look to repackage and dispose of the collateralized debt obligations held on balance sheet, says the insider.

Advest Inc., a regional brokerage and investment-banking subsidiary of The MONY Group, has hired Rich Musumeci, to the new position of managing director and co-head of credit trading. The hire is the first part of a plan to significantly expand the firm's fixed-income business, says Joe Blair, executive v.p. and head of Advest's capital markets group. "It's a desire to expand something that's working well," he says, adding that revenues from the business were up 60% and profits by over 100% last year.

AIG Global Investment Corp. is prepping a collateralized debt obligation backed by private equity partnerships. The $1 billion deal, underwritten by Morgan Stanley, will be AIG's first collateralized fund obligation and is set to close this month. Jon Strain, head of the CDO syndicate at Morgan Stanley, did not return a call, nor did David Pinkerton, the AIG portfolio manager in charge of the ramp-up of this deal.

Investors last week jumped all over the fat coupon on a $200 million, three-year "B" loan for CITGO Petroleum. The deal was priced at LIBOR plus 51/ 4%, a big hike from the spread of about 100 basis points over LIBOR for previous facilities. The deal closed in three days and is already allocated. The Credit Suisse First Boston-led deal accompanies a $550 million bond deal and a $200 million accounts receivable facility. The stiff pricing boost is most likely a result of all the uncertainty in the market over Venezuela, said Thomas Coleman, senior v.p. at Moody's Investors Service. "The market is extracting a huge premium," he stated. The company's cash flow has been affected directly and indirectly because of the oil strikes and political shakeups in Venezuela.

Credit Suisse First Boston is set to eliminate all assignment fees on CSFB-agented deals, no matter which firm trades the bank loans, as long as counterparties agree to settle electronically. The move is designed to spur use of electronic settlement in the secondary loan market, where par trades settle T+10 and distressed trades can take months. It also confronts the thorny issue of assignment fees, which annoy investors and draw testy lines between dealers.