IF IT DOESN'T SELL--SWAP IT
It's one of the latest fads in the Eurobond market: repackaging cheap, fixed-rate bonds as floating-rate notes. The game, growing in the past two years, hotted up in March with the glut of unsaleable corporate straight bonds.
Morgan Guaranty in London claims to have done "hundreds of millions of dollars"-worth of such business in recent months. Citicorp has published a tombstone boasting $1 billion of fixed-to-floating synthetic bonds sold in the past year. Paribas Capital Markets says it did $500 million of dollar asset swaps in the first six months of this year, and around $200 million in other currencies. First Insterstate in London is also a major player; it's done around $750 million of synthetic bond deals in the past 12 months.
Like all swaps business, it's an arbitage play, and the spur to the market came with the widening of the Eurodollar/US Treasury yield ifferential during the last quarter of 1985. In short, corporate paper rated less than AA status has become virtually unsaleable. When the US Treasury bond market ticks up, invariably the Eurobond market lags and the spread differential widens (just as when T-bonds move down, traders in Europe invariably fail to mark down their prices in line).