Much of the asset-backed securities world has converged on Boca Raton, Florida, this week, for one of the industry's biggest conferences. Ironically, however, plenty of the chit-chat on the sidelines could centre on the storm that largely passed Florida by.

Investors and analysts have been working the telephones, trying to quantify the damage done by Hurricane Katrina to three other US states and the impact on the pools of credit card, car and home loans that underpin the huge ABS and mortgage-backed securities markets in the US.