One of the myths, for want of a better word, that banks promote over the state of their recent funding is that they've continued to sell term debt more or less as they would have planned, just at higher margins.In the 24 weeks since July 2007 Australian banks have sold a little more than $5 billion in term wholesale debt into the domestic market, according to data compiled by ratings agency Standard & Poor's. Banks sold $6.3 billion in wholesale debt in the same period in 2006 and $7.5 billion in term debt in 2005.In the offshore debt market Australian issuers sold $29 billion in wholesale debt in the 24 weeks to date. S&P estimates that banks would account for around 95 per cent of all funding. This compares with the sale of $39 billion in debt in the corresponding period in 2006.This data relates to public placement of bank-issued liabilities and thus excludes private placement activity that, by definition, isn't tracked. Supposedly private placement activity has been higher lately and that might mean that banks have sold more term debt over the period of the crunch than is apparent from the S&P data.An alternative source of data is the financial accounts published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, as a complement to the national accounts. These are sometimes known as "flow of funds" data.For the September 2007 quarter, bonds sold offshore by banks (on a net basis) amounted to $9.5 billion, up from $1.3 billion in the June 2007 quarter and compared with average sales of offshore bonds of $12.8 billion in the three quarters prior to that.Banks redeemed $700 million of "one name" paper during September 2007 after selling $8.9 billion in the prior quarter.Net liabilities raised under this category averaged $26 billion in each of the two prior financial years.