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DRESDNER Kleinwort Benson joined forces with Creditanstalt Investment Bank this week to complete the privatisation of Bank Austria through a transaction that resembled a block trade. The two firms sold 2m preference shares at Asch880, a discount of just Asch10 to the closing price of the stock, raising Asch1.76bn for the government - slightly more than was initially expected.

DEUTSCHE Ausgleichsbank added to the growing flow of Bund proxies when it launched a highly successful DM2bn bond this week. The 10 year deal, lead managed by Deutsche Bank and HSBC Trinkaus, carried a July 4, 2008 maturity - matching one of the dates of the regular calendar of Bund issuance - and drew strong demand from investors in Europe and Asia.

SUMITOMO Bank deftly sidestepped the financial year end jostle of Japanese bank CLOs to sell £479m of paper backed by its UK corporate loans. Sumitomo and its bookrunner Lehman Brothers were geared up to launch Aurora Funding (No 1) plc on Friday last week, but postponed the issue till yesterday (Thursday) to allow time for bookbuilding and to scotch any suspicion that Sumitomo was desperate to come to market before March 31.

SBAB, the Swedish state owned mortgage bank, may launch a Skr1.01bn securitisation of loans to five municipal housing companies as early as today (Friday), adding to the flow of packaged social housing loans from Europe. Houses in Sweden AB 1 (HISAB 1) will be a 7.5 year bullet security rated AAA by Standard & Poor's and Duff & Phelps. The deal has been structured by Swedish securitisation boutique Fredell & Co, and will be lead managed by a European bank.

* Lehman Brothers this week launched the first deal from its Structured Asset Securities Corp (Sasco) shelf to be backed by European assets. Sasco Europe 1998-C1 securitises a commercial mortgage portfolio acquired by Lehman early last year from Barclays Mercantile. The 780 loans have an average size of £140,000 and are extended to small businesses in the UK, including nursing homes. The bulk of the passthrough deal came in a £79.66m senior tranche, rated Aa2/AA, with a three year average life and coupon of 35bp over one month Libor.

SBC WARBURG Dillon Read will bring a new asset class to the sterling market today (Friday) when it parcels surplus income for UK mutual insurer National Provident Institution. But the deal has global significance too - to date this kind of cashflow has only been securitised in a few small, shorter dated private deals in the US. Mutual Securitisation plc will issue at least £250m of fixed rate paper in two tranches, with average lives of nine and 20 years. The bonds will amortise according to a fixed schedule. The short tranche, worth at least £130m, will be priced at 140bp over Gilts, while the longer piece will have a minimum size of £120m and spread of 170bp.

The Hong Kong dollar bond market has stood tall amid the carnage in Asian financial markets of the last few months.

DEFINING the HKMA's role at the forefront of the development of Hong Kong's increasingly sophisticated bond market, executive director Peter Pang outlines a five pronged approach.

The recently established Hong Kong Mortgage Corporation will bring liquidity and innovation to the local capital markets and a new Hong Kong borrower to the international markets.

Once retail dominated, the Swiss bond market is changing fast, as investment pools are increasingly managed by professionals demanding to buy - and trade - in size.

In this issue, Johan G.B. Beumée, a partner in Riskcare Limited, and Paul Wilmott, professor of mathematics from Imperial College London, present some approximations of the warrant pricing method introduced in a previous Learning Curve (DW 1/12).