Edgar Ancona and Bruce Foster were in Japan last month. This is nothing unusual for the treasurer and his vice-president of Household Finance, although a casual observer might wonder what a largely domestic US consumer Wnance company is doing over there.
It is part of the company's strategy of broadening its investor base. In the past 18 months, for example, UBS Warburg has taken the company on investor presentations to 15 cities around Europe and the Middle East. And of course Household is yet another borrower that has realized that the best way to get your paper out there is to issue big. This year the company expects to issue roughly $10 billion in debt securities, nearly $1 billion more than last year, to Wnance its major businesses: credit cards, both private label or the old staples of Visa and MasterCard, credit insurance, and auto finance.
Dollar global bonds and benchmark deals in euro and Deutschmark currencies are the more public of the deals it has used so far to do this. But in the past, including last year, the company issued a lot of smaller deals in a variety of structures, including US MTNs, Euro-MTNs, certiWcates of deposit, and asset-backed deals.