October 2014

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 SEC – have finally managed to agree, albeit with significant dissent at the FDIC and the SEC, on a Final Rule.  Note that Richard Cordray of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (in Progressive Causes) …er…the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, apparently had a heavy finger on the scales, which is why there was material dissent at the FDIC and SEC.  So, after all those years of waiting, we have “it.”  “It” of course is another five hundred some odd pages of commentary and bloviating and a relatively few pages of actual Rule which, as we study it more, will inevitably have left much that will need to be subsequently clarified.  We have already found technical inconsistencies between the commentary and the Rule. 
Continue Reading Risk Retention and Stockholm Syndrome

Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) loans allow property owners to finance clean energy improvements to their properties generally secured by property liens senior to mortgages through tax assessments.  Moody’s recently released a special comment expressing some concerns and not-so-subtle hints that it thinks that lenders and securitizers should take PACE programs seriously.
Continue Reading PACE Yourself

By: Daniel Wohlberg and Sean Solis

On Sunday, September 21st through Tuesday, September 23rd, almost 3,500 industry insiders descended upon Miami Beach for the 20th annual ABS East Conference at the acclaimed Fontainebleau Hotel. The enthusiasm and excitement was palpable considering the record setting year the market had so far, especially in the CLO space.  The general tenor was cautious optimism as many believe the roaring market would continue for the next few years, but saving a bit of hesitation for some of the regulatory pitfalls up ahead.  Most were comfortable, however, considering the market’s resilience in dealing with the recent implementation of the Volcker Rule.


Continue Reading Securitization in the Sand – ABS East Turns Twenty

Have you heard the following thought expressed recently in one way or the another, “I’m less worried about what new black swans might swim onto our screens and more worried that we will just wake up one day, peer out of our bunker of habituated indifferences to the drumbeat of troubling news and decide, suddenly, that things actually are terrible!”  Bad news seems to pile upon bad news in the larger world.  We are off the map of the known universe in terms of monetary and fiscal norms, and yet when the last worse headline comes across the ticker, and the newsreaders do their level best to create drama, the debt and equity markets seem to, well, yawn.  What happens if one day we wake up and all of a sudden all that which was benign yesterday is terrible today?  It’s like one of those sci-fi movies where the doughy earthlings encounter a race of beautiful, peaceful people and then, in a blink, see them as the multi-arm, walking crustaceans with eyes on stalks and a distinct preference for space hero tapas that they really are. 
Continue Reading The Grand Illusion: A Strategy

While leveraged loan ETF and money market funds face an unsteady near-term future amidst ongoing retail investor outflow, the CLO market is rolling towards its busiest year ever.  With year-to-date global issuance at approximately $98 billion (with $89 billion or so in the U.S. alone) as of mid-September, many market commentators see $125 billion in total U.S. CLO issuance by year-end as a real possibility.  Recent reports calculate that CLOs accounted for nearly 60% of new issue institutional leveraged loan demand in the first half of 2014.  As new collateral managers continue to enter the market and the industry has recovered from the Volcker Rule chill of mid-winter, market actors are now preparing to deal with the challenges that the forthcoming U.S. risk retention rules will inevitably present.

With all of the above news dominating the CLO headlines, some market observers may have missed a less heralded development in the CLO market, which is very likely to have an impact on both the CLO market and the leveraged loan market.  On August 1, 2014, S&P released an updated CLO rating methodology that provides for a more nuanced classification of recovery assumptions related to the assets acquired by CLOs.  The challenges and opportunities presented by the updated S&P methodology are worthy of attention.
Continue Reading CLO Market Update: S&P Recovery Ratings, More’s the Merrier