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TALK that YPF may try to buy back its own shares from the Argentine government was fuelled on Thursday when the company uncharacteristically ignored wide secondary spreads and launched a $100m 30 put three year issue in the US bond market. The BBB-/Ba3 rated deal, led by JP Morgan, was launched with a 10% coupon, giving it a spread of around 560bp to 570bp at a time when BB/Ba3 rated Argentina's 2001s were around 578bp, YPF's 2003s were at 537bp and its 2007s at 505bp. The 30 put three year structure clearly appeals to investors who are looking for high convexity bonds.

US ASSET backed issuers roared back into action this week, as investors snapped up over $4bn of credit card paper and a $1.6bn auto lease deal from World Omni. Several of the deals were increased, and spreads appear to have turned the corner, with five year floating rate credit cards offered below 30bp for the first time in weeks. Spread tightening was even more marked in the fixed rate sector, where margins had blown out furthest since the Russian debt default. As swap spreads narrowed, investors regained confidence in fixed rate deals -- issuers crowded into the five year maturity and still did not exhaust demand.

WESTDEUTSCHE Landesbank's London securitisation group, hired en masse from Deutsche Bank in June, has some $2.5bn of mandates that it hopes to put into the bank's Compass Securitisation conduit by the year end. These include one portfolio of car hire purchase contracts and one of auto leases for two UK captive vehicle finance companies, and two pools of trade receivables from UK manufacturers.

IRELAND'S largest mortgage lender, Irish Permanent plc, this week launched the largest securitisation of UK mortgages so far this year, with a £400m deal lead managed by Greenwich NatWest. Auburn Securities 1 parcels almost all the mortgages on the books of Capital Home Loans Ltd, a UK non-bank lender acquired by Irish Permanent in 1996.

* RAKS Holding has become the first Turkish corporate to use securitisation, with a $15m deal backed by future dollar denominated export receivables and arranged by WestLB through its Compass Securitisation conduit. RAKS is a diversified group which manufactures electrical goods and audio and video software, as well as having interests in broadcasting and music and video production.

FRENCH wool processing company Chargeurs may launch its $250m securitisation of trade and contract receivables as early as next week. Bookrunner Merrill Lynch has already placed the deal's two equity pieces, and has found good demand for the $175m to $200m senior tranche, which will be rated A+ by Duff & Phelps and A1 by Moody's.

The analysis and management of options requires that one be able to digest a certain Greek alphabet soup.

For investors lucky enough to have subscribed for (and to have been allotted) Neuer Markt issues at the primary level, Germany's junior stockmarket has been a runaway success.

"Convalescing, rather than on a life support machine," is how Mark Aitken, head of the high yield fixed income department at Dresdner Kleinwort Benson in London, describes Germany's fledgling high yield bond market.

Good idea, shame about the execution. This still seems to be the verdict on the funding strategy of several of Germany's Länder.

They are an ungrateful lot, the German electorate. More specifically, the electorate in the new Bundesländer are an ungrateful lot. Today, it is easy enough to forget that when Helmut Kohl ascended to the chancellorship of the old Bundesrepublik in 1982, the east Germans living on the other side of the Berlin Wall scarcely knew what a vote was.

If the outlook for German equities looked uncertain prior to September's election and the ascent to political power of the Red-Green coalition, it looked decidedly more so after it.