ING Bank (Australia) (A+) was the only domestic issuer last week. That said, it issued A$2.0 billion of five-year bonds and received bids of almost A$3.0 billion for the government-guaranteed issue. While the volume of government-guaranteed bond issuance has been steady, rather than a rush, since Treasury announced two weeks ago that the availability of guarantee would cease from the end of March, it is clear that there is massive investor demand for such bonds. ING set out to raise between A$1.5 and A$2.0 billion priced at 35 basis points over swap and bank bills. With ample demand ING was able to reduce the pricing to 33 bps for the fixed and floating rate issue, with $1 billion sold in each line. From an investors' perspective, if you can achieve a yield of 33 bps over swap or 76 bps over the five-year Commonwealth government bond rate, for exactly the same risk, why wouldn't you rush the issue? Since the guarantee became available ING has raised A$8.1 billion in the domestic market.