There was some excitement last week when the news broke that BHP Billiton will be meeting with local debt investors over the next few weeks - and it will be doing so without any bankers involved.With much being made of retiring Chairman Don Argus' recent comments about the need to support the domestic bond market and ensure it becomes a viable source of debt for corporate Australia, speculation was on a domestic bond issue and possibly even a retail issue. But why are no banks involved in the meetings? BHP has remained silent.There could be nothing more in these meetings than BHP being considerate of its debt investors. While it has no domestic bonds outstanding, it issued €2.25 billion of Eurobonds and US$3.25 billion of global bonds, last year. Local debt investors are likely to be holding some of the latter, if not the former.On the other hand, a bond issue could be in the offing; but BHP is sitting on a pile of cash at the moment and is geared at only 15 per cent. If BHP is going to do a bond issue, it will have to be for something big.BHP last issued in the domestic market in November 2001 - it raised A$1 billion at the time. If it were to issue now, it could probably raise A$2.0 billion. Investor demand would be huge, but there are limits as to how much the market can fund at any time.Raising money in the domestic market at the moment would be advantageous for BHP. As BHP operates in US dollars, it could deduct 40 bps or more from its cost of five- to ten-year debt, when it hedges it back to US dollars. And, as it will have done much of the legwork with investors itself, it will certainly be able to minimise any fees that have to be paid to bankers for a bond issue.But if there is something big on the horizon, a domestic bond issue seems implausible. Another US dollar global bond issue, in which domestic investors can be expected to participate, would be a more plausible scenario.As for the most implausible scenario of all - a retail bond issue - regulations allowing the use of short form prospectuses for this purpose have yet to be framed, let alone introduced. And then there is the credit rating fiasco. The impact of a lack of a credit rating on retail bonds has been played down by some market participants. But this overlooks the need for institutional investor participation.If there is ever to be a deep and liquid listed bond market, then institutional investor participation is essential. However, most institutional investors operate with investment mandates that require that they hold only rated bonds.