What funny times in which we live; an observation perhaps highly dependent upon your notion of fun. Maybe curious is the better description. Daunting? Frightening? Opaque and unknowable? All probably good descriptions. True of politics. True of business. Sticking to business, it’s hard to get conviction around anything right now. Nonetheless, we must. Everyone needs … Continue Reading
It’s Golden Turkey Awards Time, Folks! Our Turkeys are a little late this year but hey, we’ve been busy worrying about the collapse of the world’s economy. This is the 10th edition of our Turkeys and much thanks to our disorderly, often dysfunctional, regularly inscrutable and absurd government, polity and marketplace for continuing to provide … Continue Reading
I wrote a week or two back about my expectation that significant economic dislocation awaits us. I still think that. The morning after I published, hordes (ok, maybe not hordes) of PhD Villeins were outside my house with pitchforks and burning torches, loudly asserting that I had wildly overstated the likelihood of material distress in … Continue Reading
Welcome, dear reader, to our annual Golden Turkey Awards. But for my commitment to absolute fairness and concern over the appearance of impropriety, I would have awarded the first Golden Turkey Award to Dechert for actually getting the Golden Turkey Awards done this year. What a crazy year end. The market is insane. On the … Continue Reading
Since nothing is happening in the news right now, we thought we would put out a second post on LIBOR this week. As you may know, Dechert has a LIBOR podcast which you can find on our YouTube page. In the latest episode, David Bowman, Senior Associate Director from the Board of Governors of the … Continue Reading
Regulators have been increasing their scrutiny of LIBOR transition efforts as they ramp up messaging stressing that the time to act is now. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations (OCIE) issued a National Exam Program Risk Alert to introduce a LIBOR Examination Initiative on the upcoming discontinuation of, and transition … Continue Reading
Here is something helpful that has surfaced amidst the fallout, pain and confusion of the global COVID-19 crisis. The implementation date for the all-too-simple in theory but not-simple-at-all in practice CECL accounting standard has been pushed back by the passage of the CARES Act for banks until the COVID-19 national emergency declared by the president … Continue Reading
The Federal Reserve, OCC and FDIC have (finally) issued the Final HVCRE Rule (for background, our analysis of the 2018 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and 2019 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking are here and here), regarding High Volatility Commercial Real Estate (HVCRE) regulations that affect acquisition, development or construction (ADC) loans made by banking organizations that are … Continue Reading
Just when you thought the regulators had forgotten about HVCRE ADC, they issued a new notice of proposed rulemaking like they were Beyoncé surprise-dropping a new album. And then…they disappeared again! We were waiting for more news before alerting our readers but nothing has come to date. To bring those not in the HVCRE ADC-hive … Continue Reading
The US economy is about to pay the butcher’s bill for a massive disruption of worldwide financial markets resulting from the elimination of the London Interbank Offered Rate, or LIBOR. And, we are doing this on purpose. It seems the denizens of the heights of our international financial fabric felt they had to do this … Continue Reading
You can never go wrong starting off a commentary with a butchered bit from the Bard, right? “Now is the winter of our discontent” spake Richard III, an unamiable leader perhaps reminding us all today of our unamiable governing class. Old Gloucester rhymed to presage war and chaos. Apparently, all that happened because the poor … Continue Reading
Add HVCRE reform to the list of things that have bi-partisan support (currently on the list: flag pins and banning the use of Twitter in the White House). On Tuesday, the House passed (with bi-partisan support…which should bolster its chances of passing in the Senate) H.R.2148 – Clarifying Commercial Real Estate Loans, otherwise known as … Continue Reading
At long last (at least for those of us who have been checking the Federal Register daily), the proposed HVADC rule has been published in the Federal Register and is open for comment. The public (that’s us!) has 60 days to comment – so all comments are due by December 26, 2017 (Ho ho ho!). … Continue Reading
On September 27, 2017, the Federal Reserve, FDIC and OCC released a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPR) that they describe as simplifying compliance with certain aspects of the agencies’ risk based capital (RBC) rules to, among other things, replace the standardized approach’s (SA) treatment of HVCRE loans with a simpler treatment for most acquisition, development … Continue Reading
CREFC has surveyed some of its attendees—all major participants in the commercial real estate finance industry—at the 2017 CRE Finance Council January Conference in Miami. CREFC’s 2017 market outlook survey confirmed what we observed at the conference this year, that for the most part survey respondents were cautiously optimistic in the face of the Trump Administration, … Continue Reading
I’d like everyone to go out and buy a copy of Professor Paul Mahoney’s slender new book, Wasting a Crisis – Why Securities Regulation Fails. Paul is a brilliant guy. Until this spring, he was the dean of the University of Virginia School of Law where he is the David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor … Continue Reading
The Dodd-Frank Act was a cornucopia of opportunity for rule writers. To the regulatory community, this was almost a bottomless candy jar. And so our regulatory apparatchiki began to beaver away and produced, to date, something like 22,000 pages of rules which purport to moderate or prevent bad behavior by all those nasty institutions perceived … Continue Reading
And now to return to our commentary a few weeks back about the stultifying impact of ill-thought through rules and regulations (at best) (Brexit has intervened). This is our Regulatory State which broadly attempted to pick winners and losers and modify market behavior, to get an engineered outcome by using the blunderbuss of proscriptive rules … Continue Reading
As we do each year at Crunched Credit, we take the end of a calendar year as an opportunity to stop and reflect on where we are, and what the next year might hold. Recognizing the certainty that a successful prediction is more a random event – a blind cat finding a dead mouse, than … Continue Reading
Is the Federal Reserve overreaching by broadening the scope of its policies? If extremism in the defense of liberty is (reportedly) no vice, unremitting, continuous undisciplined chatter for the sake of transparency is no virtue. God knows transparency has become the sine qua non of public ethics these days. To be accused of not being … Continue Reading
After three years of waiting, we now have our Risk Retention Rule. All six of the Agencies responsible for the Rule – the FDIC, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the … Continue Reading
A few steps forward and a giant leap back. This familiar phrase might be the perfect summary of the CLO market’s Volcker Rule roller coaster since December 2013. A few weeks ago we wrote about the Federal Reserve Board’s (the “Fed”) less than satisfying “fix” to address what the market has perceived as one of … Continue Reading
On April 7th the Federal Reserve Board (the “Fed”) announced that it would provide banking entities with two additional one-year extensions to conform their ownership of CLOs covered by the Volcker Rule. The Fed stated that it would act on these extensions in August of 2014 and 2015. The Fed’s action would extend the conformity … Continue Reading
Several U.S. banking agencies recently approved a joint final rule, set to go into effect on January 1, 2013, regarding the amount of capital required under risk-based capital rules for banking organizations to cover market risk. The new rule aims to revise banking organizations’ internal modeling practices to better analyze and calculate their exposure to … Continue Reading
