As is our tradition here at Crunched Credit, each year, about this time, we present our Golden Turkey Awards. In a year of monumentally bad surprises, we truly had difficulty narrowing our list down to only the exceptionally worthy candidates. Voters, governments and regulators sent shockwaves throughout the world in 2016, upending markets and throwing much of what we thought we knew into the proverbial dumpster fire of society. If what we know now we knew when we last gave the Golden Turkey Awards, we may have taken a pass on 2016. It can’t get any worse, right? As we get ready to step into the unknown of 2017, here is our list for 2016:
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Love (Financially Speaking) in the Time of Trump
This commentary is not customarily about politics, although those with a subtle cast of mind might get an inkling of some my personal views from my always dry and balanced language. However, right now, it’s hard not to think explicitly about politics and the new Trump administration.
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Risk Retention and the CRE CLO
As we are just inking one of the very first pre-risk retention effective date risk retention deals (Potemkin Village anyone?), we are also seeing an increased flow of what are generically referred to as CRE CLOs. It’s time to consider how the Risk Retention Rule (the “Rule”) will apply to this growing market technology.
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Seeing is Believing: ALTA’s New Survey Standards
For those of you who read our commentary regularly, you’ll see that we span the commentariat world from musings of perhaps little practical utility but great import (at least to us) to the more mundane. Today, mundane. Let’s talk title policies and survey standards. There’s good news here and often good news doesn’t travel fast enough, so here we go.
Title policies “insure over” information that a survey would discern. It’s precious little good to have a title policy yet find out there’s a missile silo just behind the setback line owned by the US Government. So title companies require a survey and will generally insure over any nasty surprises the survey would have uncovered.
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A Report From the Risk Retention Front-Lines
Your correspondent is fresh from the front-lines of the risk retention wars where great armies of lawyers, bankers and advisers are fixedly staring at each other, staring out of the redoubts of their respective defensive crouches in a complex, multidimensional chess game. All are fervently hoping against hope that something or someone does something to create clarity and allow our business to pivot around this new set of rules so it can continue to thrive. I think all of us in the finance world are justifiably proud of the fact that if we are given a set of rules, we’ll figure out how to conduct business. But the uncertainty here is freezing everyone in place, a giant front court pick that we can’t seem to get around. But one thing is certain and that is that Christmas Eve is coming and with it this Rule will become effective. After having obsessed about the Risk Retention Rule for years now, we are broadly no closer to clarity about how one should play in the soon to be upon us risk retention world.
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Why Regulation Fails
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 of Law and the Arnold H. Leon Professor of Law, teaching securities laws. This is a great book and an important read. Paul argues cogently that:
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“Shaking” Things Up: Seismic Risk Assessments
Returning to our theme that nothing’s easy and everything keeps changing, here is one out of left field. Let’s talk Probable Maximum Loss (“PML”) and seismic risk. ASTM International, the market standard setting organization for everything from toilet bowls to condoms, has just issued an amended seismic standards: Standard Guide for Assessments of Buildings (E2026-16) and their Standard Practice for Probable Maximum Loss Evaluations for Earthquakes (E2557-16) (the “Standards”)[1]. These Standards establish an industry norm for the requirements to evaluate the financial risk for real estate in zones with seismic activity. Each investigation of real estate is “graded” between a Level 0 investigation (high uncertainty) and a Level 3 investigation (very low uncertainty) based on the qualifications of the assessors and the work done during the investigation. The Standards refer to a Level 0 investigation as a “desktop” investigation, maybe (in a completely subtle way) to imply something about the proximity of the assessors to the potentially shaking site.Continue Reading “Shaking” Things Up: Seismic Risk Assessments
Dodd-Frank Rulemaking Developments by the Fed for Fed-Supervised Insurance Firms
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 to have some responsibility for the financial crisis of 2008. Curiously, at least, to me, Dodd-Frank included in among its bad boys, those institutions “significantly engaged in insurance activities.” Apparently, our Congressional grandees in the overheated environment of the Great Recession conflated insurance and banking. Hey, they are kind of like financial institutions, and they’re big, or at least some of them are, and are probably filing with nefarious types inclined to go off the reservation and therefore in need of “guidance” from the regulatory community.
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A Trip Through the Labyrinth – The Regulatory Man in Full
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 and regulation.
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CREFC Annual Conference 2016: Headwinds or Head First Into the Wall?
The slow start to 2016 did not dampen the enthusiasm at CREFC’s Annual Conference, held last week in New York City. The conference saw record attendance, with standing-room-only crowds at virtually every panel. As with the Industry Leaders Conference in January, the hot topics on people’s minds were risk retention (and the rest of the regulatory headwinds), liquidity and the competitiveness of the CMBS market.
The conference made very clear that we are at an inflection point in the current cycle. The general mood of the conference, in our view, was the confluence of nervousness and cautious optimism. The gloominess of the first quarter, and fears over the “sky is falling,” has yielded to mild bouts of enthusiasm (at least if the parties were any indication). The capital markets have settled down over the past few months, spreads have tightened, and borrowers have begun to trickle back into the CMBS market.
Clearly our industry faces headwinds, and nobody is betting on a record second half, but we also did not hear anyone ringing the death knell for our business. We left the conference with more questions than answers. Here are some:Continue Reading CREFC Annual Conference 2016: Headwinds or Head First Into the Wall?