Joerg Huber - LBBW Joerg Huber is managing director, head of debt capital markets, responsible for the primary markets business, benchmark issuance and international funding activities. His main focus is on European borrowers. Laurent Viteau - EuroMTS Laurent Viteau is executive director, head of sales for the MTS Group in London. He is responsible for the definition and implementation of strategy, for relationships with banks, issuers and investors and for marketing and business development on

Safety, transparency and liquidity – these are the three pillars of the covered bond industry. Like a financial Parthenon, the Pfandbrief market enjoys the grandest and oldest pillars of all, and provides the benchmark by which all other covered bond markets are measured. Befitting its status as the world’s number one covered bond market, the Pfandbrief sector held up better than most markets, but everything has a breaking point. The first pillar, safety, was no problem: the Pfandbrief market ha

IFR: Laurent, can MTS assist in what Louis has said on transparency? Viteau: We can always argue about whether or not there should be market making, but it is the way the secondary market has traded that probably must change slightly. Five years ago, one of the prerequisites for a liquid bond was to have it trading somewhere where everybody could see it. There was a commitment to put positions on the balance sheet all day long, which is what the investment banks were doing. That applies to all t

IFR: Have we seen any flows go through EuroMTS lately? Viteau: If you talk about covered bonds and the interdealer market, there has been hardly any flow. There was a bit of pick up late August and early September, but then it basically died. If you look on the client side, at the investor, yes, there have been some flows. They came late in the year, but there have been some flows. Engelhard: But there is a major discrepancy between what the rule was last year or early this year and what it is n

IFR: Why did Pfandbriefe contain its spreads so long after the market crisis? Fritz Engelhard, Barclays Capital: Firstly there is a strong domestic investor base. That has helped the Pfandbrief market a lot. Secondly, it's one of the most established products across the spectrum of covered bonds. And thirdly, it was experiencing shrinking supply, particularly at the jumbo level, while some of the other covered bond markets were seeing supply growing quite strongly. Olaf Pimper, Dresdner Bank: Th