August 2017

The Wall Street Journal reminded us this month that it was ten years ago, August 9, 2007, that the first regulatory domino in The Great Recession fell as BNP Paribas froze a series of resi investment funds for lack of a functioning market to value the securities. One could quibble about whether The Great Recession could be so precisely dated. Were there the blackened equivalent of green shoots earlier in the year? Did The Great Recession really only begin when the trouble in the subprime resi market morphed into all other credit markets? But that’s merely a cavil. August 9, 2007 is, for me, the date the world changed.
Continue Reading A Tale of Two Years; This Time Will Be Different

Here’s a headline for you:  We don’t know if a conventional CMBS securitization where risk retention bonds are retained by a B-buyer under an industry standard third party purchaser agreement achieves accounting sale treatment.  Failure of accounting sale treatment means the selling bank cannot book the gain and does not derecognize the underlying loans resulting in the entire portfolio of loans remaining on its balance sheet for both Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or GAAP, and presumably, for risk based capital purposes.

As might have been said by that great philosopher of the 20th Century: “You cannot possibly be serious!”

Commercial Mortgage Alert broke the story on Friday, August 11th and so I’m finally going to talk about the issue.  I’ve been itching to do so since early June when I became aware of the problem but it really didn’t seem there was a lot of upside for a broad industry discussion of the problem back then while the auditors and the internal finance teams at our banks and other CMBS sponsors were still pondering the issue.  But, after a good deal of mulling and to-ing and fro-ing, it’s still not resolved so I think it’s time to bring fun with GAAP out of the closet.Continue Reading Fun With GAAP:  CMBS at Risk

Last week, an article written by Mr. Frank Partnoy, professor of law at the University of San Diego,  appeared in the Financial Times and was subsequently picked up by The Wall Street Journal.  Mr. Partnoy argues that the next global financial crisis will be found inside the CLO industry and that past is prologue.

I think he is looking under the wrong rock for the next global financial crisis and this note should serve as a letter to the editor in rebuttal, as it were.  (Perhaps I’ll send Professor Partnoy his own personalized copy.)

Here’s the news flash:  There will be another global financial crisis.  Death, taxes, the cycle and Page Six misbehavior will never go away.  However, history suggests that the next one will be less severe than the 2007-2009 meltdown which, one can hope will continue to be entitled to the honorific “The Great Recession” for many decades to come. 
Continue Reading The Sequel to the Global Financial Crisis Is Not the CLO! (Ok, Not Yet)

A standalone securitization of a portfolio of properties closed in June. To our knowledge, this was the first transaction in recent memory done in a direct issuance format.  In this case, direct issuance means that the sponsor organized the lender and the depositor as well as a borrower and crafted the loan between the lender and borrower, which was simultaneously closed and funded by the bond proceeds from the securitization at closing.  An additional unique feature in this transaction was that the sponsor met its obligations under the risk retention rules with a horizontal cash deposit equal to 5% of the fair value of the certificates.  More on this later.

In this annoying new world of risk retention, the direct issuance model embodied in this transaction can be a paradigm for transactions in the SASB space.
Continue Reading Direct Issuance is Here – A New Paradigm for Single Asset Single Borrower (SASB) Securitization