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CREDIT AGRICOLE Indosuez has kickstarted the French mortgage backed market for 1998 with the debut securitisation this week from Banque La Hénin. Florimmo Mortgage Loans Securitisation, a fonds commun de créances, sold Ffr1.5bn of Euronotes with an average life of 1.43 years and Ffr915m of domestic bonds with a 4.84 year average life.

TWO groups of UK housing associations successfully tapped the long dated sterling investor base this week, lending further strength to one of Europe's most coherent asset backed market sectors. Hambros Bank inaugurated Haven Funding (32) plc, a new vehicle structured almost exactly like Haven Funding, but which reaches maturity in 2032 rather than 2037.

PARAGON, one of the main survivors from the UK's centralised home lending boom of the 1980s and a leading light in sub-prime mortgage securitisation, returned to the markets this week with a £175m deal through HSBC Markets. "We are delighted to be leading a deal for one of the most frequent issuers in the UK," said a structuring official at the bank. "We won the mandate in December on the strength of our dominant distribution capability in sterling, structuring expertise and relationship with Paragon." HSBC is one of the lender's bankers.

ASIA'S only monoline financial guarantor, ASIA Ltd, has been downgraded by Standard & Poor's from A to BB, leaving investors in $1.4bn of guaranteed product with sharply devalued assets. S&P took action because, following sovereign downgrades in Korea and Indonesia, the percentage of sub-investment grade assets guaranteed by ASIA Ltd had risen to around 40%, well above the 25% limit in the company's operating guidelines.

SUNAMERICA Life Insurance Co made its return to the Euromarkets this week with a $200m FRN backed by guaranteed investment contracts (GICs). ABN AMRO sold the single tranche, issued off SunAmerica's note issuance programme SunAmerica Institutional Funding. Rated AA- by Standard & Poor's, the deal pays a coupon of 12.5bp over three month Libor to its bullet maturity in February 2003.

A vast amount of effort is spent upon producing complex market models.

ABBEY NATIONAL, one of the Euromarket's more active borrowers, is seeking to repeat the success of its recent debut Uridashi bond with the launch of a repeat transaction on Monday. With Nomura again as lead manager, the UK high street bank is lining up a ¥20bn-¥50bn two year deal with a dual currency structure that will offer redemption in sterling.

THE BANCO Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) is expected to make a decision by the middle of next week on the structure of its prospective dollar fundraising, with bankers commenting that the republic is almost certain to opt for a bank rather than a bond financing. The $500m to $1bn issue also looks likely to be the first sovereign transaction to emerge from Asia this year, in a move that has been welcomed by most market participants.

KOREA'S MAMMOTH fundraising programme looks likely to take shape in New York next week during what looks set to be a series of extremely heated debates between a government with a reputation for pricing inflexibility and a 90-strong group of creditor banks hoping to extract some value from the republic's financial distress. Bankers say that of the two plans on the table, the JP Morgan-led commercial bank debt exchange now looks to be favoured over a Goldman Sachs/Salomon Smith Barney bond plan.

THE BILLION shares-plus demutualisation of Australian Mutual Provident (AMP) will be launched in April or May and list on the Australian Stock Exchange in early June, according to a company spokesman. Institutional investors will be able to buy around 22.5% of the sale.

* Two further deals were launched in Hong Kong's active domestic currency market this week. Merrill Lynch came first with a HK$300m fixed rate offering for the European Bank for Reconstruction & Development. With a one year maturity, the par priced issue carried a coupon of 12.625%, with fees totalling 10bp, split 2.5bp managers and underwriters 7.5bp selling.

Pakistan Standard & Poor's revised its sovereign outlook on the Islamic Republic of Pakistan from stable to negative on Wednesday, although it stopped short of effecting a downgrade to the country's B+ long term rating. In a statement it said that the revised outlook reflected "a rising external debt burden and a growing dependence on short term funding."