Trawl through Abbey National Treasury Services' press releases for 2001, and you unearth a staggering revelation about the Holmes Financing (No 4) residential mortgage-backed (RMBS) multi-currency transaction it launched a year ago. This is that the five-year triple-A rated euro-denominated tranche raised an astounding &euro800bn[sic]. This is, of course, the sort of typo we can all make: Abbey National may be a prolific issuer in the asset-backed market, but not quite that prolific. The &euro800m ($734m) tranche was part of £2.7bn equivalent deal led last June by Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB) and Schroder Salomon Smith Barney (SSSB), notable at the time for being the largest RMBS issue Europe had ever seen.

Abbey's slip of the pen is forgivable enough. After all, the RMBS market in Europe is flourishing, and with jumbo transactions increasingly the order of the day, deals denominated in billions rather than millions can be expected to proliferate. For all the increase in CDOs, CLOs and whole-business securitisations, the RMBS sector remains the bread and butter of the European asset-backed market, accounting for $51bn, or 39%, of all issuance in 2001. That represented a 35% increase over 2000's tally and was four times the total raised in 1998, according to figures published by Standard & Poor's (S&P). This year, it seems certain that this total will be comfortably eclipsed. At the start of the year, S&P was expecting the market to grow by about 25% by the end of the first quarter of 2002, volume was up by 42.5%, to $9.3bn, compared with $6.6bn in the same period in 2001.