Liability management – where debt issuers repurchase instruments before their maturity date or exchange them for new deals – is gaining importance.

The Spanish bank BBVA last month approached holders of asset-backed security transactions totalling €9.1bn with a view to buying back their bonds. And earlier in the month the merged Bradford & Bingley and Northern Rock Asset Management entity announced that it wanted to retire up to £500m of around £2.2bn of securitised assets, most of them at the lower end of the capital structure, in the BBB region.