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The image of the cresting wave looming behind the dais in the Loews’ Americana Salon during Douglas Holtz-Eakin’s keynote address posed a central, if unintended, question that was addressed by more than one speaker during the three-day conference.  Are we riding a wave to recovery or facing a deluge of maturing debt?  For most of the 1,200 industry participants that occupied Miami’s South Beach for CREFC’s annual January conference last week, there seems to be no certain answer (other than almost unanimous agreement that South Beach is a better Winter destination than our Nation’s Capitol).Continue Reading CREFC January Conference Recap: Riding the Wave

In August I wrote about an amendment to a Chicago vacant buildings ordinance that I thought (and I was one of many) was crazy, despite being sympathetic to the plight resulting from the city’s blight. The City of Chicago subsequently passed a less onerous, yet still problematic, vacant buildings ordinance effective as of November 19, 2011.

In a nutshell, the ordinance requires mortgagees to pay registration fees for vacant residential properties, requires monthly inspections of mortgaged properties to determine vacancy status and imposes maintenance requirements on mortgagees, as if such mortgagees were property owners, even when such mortgagees do not own the property because they have not yet foreclosed on the related mortgage loan and therefore have not obtained title to the related property. Fines and penalties of up to $1000 per day could be imposed for failure to comply with the ordinance.Continue Reading More About that Chicago Vacant Buildings Ordinance

While wrapping your holiday presents, don’t forget about another regulatory gift that springs to life as of the new year: Rule 193 and the accompanying joys of Items 1111(a)(7) and 1111(a)(8) of Reg AB. The final rules for Dodd-Frank’s Section 945 – which we at CrunchedCredit.com have addressed before – are almost a year old and their effects are coming to a public transaction near you by requiring “issuers” (1) to perform (or have a third party perform) a due diligence review of a deal’s underlying assets with the aim of reasonably assuring that disclosure included in the related offering documents is materially accurate and (2) to disclose in offering documents the nature of the review, any findings or conclusions of the review and any details regarding assets that deviate from the disclosed underwriting criteria. And this is a gift that keeps on giving.Continue Reading A Dodd-Frank Holiday Reminder: Ribbons, Reindeer and Rule 193

Acting in response to last week’s removal  of the Occupy Wall Street, er, Occupants from, well, Wall Street, a Suffolk county judge ordered that the City of Boston obtain the court’s leave prior to relocating the current Occupants of Boston back to their dorm rooms.  The order is temporary, and the judge intends to hear arguments on the merits in early December.  While the Commonwealth has enjoyed a particularly temperate autumn, average temperatures dropped precipitously last week – a fact that, coupled with Dewey Square’s  proximity to the Harbor, may see to it that the issue becomes moot.  As one Occupant wrote: “Mom – protest’s gr8 but freeeeeeeeezing lol (^_^) – pls send fleece and UGG boots (check bedroom next to Xbox)!!!  GTG – c u at xmas :-)”.Continue Reading For The People; Against Corporate Greed and Securitizations and Stuff

What’s with all these public CMBS offerings?  And what about all that rule-making?  The registered market has otherwise been frozen since the pre-crisis days, and the cloud of heavy-handed regulation looming over our heads is anything but an invitation to dust off your public shelf.  Moreover, given that some of those regulations may be (or have been) applied in the 144A context, shouldn’t one be concerned about the private market before we even think about re-entering the public space?  And all of that is without even considering the general mid-year market slump.  To address these critical questions and the state of the galaxy as we know it, CREFC held an after-work seminar recently, hosted by Dechert, entitled “Review and Outlook for Public CMBS Offerings.”Continue Reading Summary of a CREFC After-Work Seminar: The Return of the Public Deal or the Regulator Strikes Back?

The fallout from Ibanez continues in the Bay State.  As I (fearfully) predicted earlier this year, the SJC of Massachusetts (in its second foreclosure-related ruling of 2011) has affirmed a lower court’s decision in Bevilacqua v. Rodriguez.  The SJC ruled Tuesday that Mr. Bevilacqua lacked clear title to a home he purchased from U.S. Bank (which had …

Ahh, Miami. I’d say it’s good to be back here at the Fontainebleau for ABS East 2011 but it’s been pouring and exceptionally windy so my time outdoors will be limited.  Dechert attorneys Mac Dorris, Ralph Mazzeo, John Timperio, Cindy Williams, Larry Berkovich, Lorien Golaski, Andrew Pontano and I hosted a well-attended cocktail party Sunday night. It was great to catch up with our friends/clients in person.

Monday morning began with a general session where some blurbs about risk retention from this October 14 New York Times article were projected on two very large screens. I later attended the “Evolving Risk Retention Requirements” panel before lunch. It’s been a while since the joint regulators released the credit risk retention NPR back in March of this year. In response, hundreds of comment letters were submitted. Click here for the ones posted by the SEC. We have blogged repeatedly on this topic here at CrunchedCredit.

Recently there has been chatter that the regulators may re-propose a new risk retention rule for comment in lieu of promulgating a final rule.Continue Reading 2011 ABS East Conference