Japan's CDO market volume up.

Small and medium-sized enterprise-backed securities (SMEs) made quite a showing in Japan's CDO market last year, Moody's Investors Service has found.

Recent research from the rating agency shows that 24 CDOs were released into the market in 2003, tallying about 4.24 trillion (US$36.2 million). Of that number, 60% of deal flow - 15 CDOs - were backed by loans for SMEs. These CDOs accounted for 3.01 trillion, or 70% of the market's volume, analysts found.

"Their growth is a natural result of efforts by Japan's central and local government to facilitate SME financing," said analysts in the report.

In an interesting twist, while volume was up over 2002, …