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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:
Continue Reading Why Regulation Fails

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.
Continue Reading A Trip Through the Labyrinth – The Regulatory Man in Full

We thought it would be useful to give a quick, interim update on the slow-motion train wreck that is our industry’s response to the upcoming effectiveness of the Risk Retention Rule.  For those of you who have been blessedly snoozing under a rock these past couple of years, the Risk Retention Rule becomes effective on Christmas Eve and applies to all transactions closed (priced?) after that date.  The Rule, to generalize a bit, requires the sponsor of a securitization to retain a 5% vertical or horizontal strip with the additional possibility of laying off some or all of that risk onto a qualified B piece buyer or a mortgage loan originator.  For more detail, please see our OnPoints, our risk retention briefing white papers and many, many back issues of this CrunchedCredit.

Here’s the headline in Muddville in May of 2017:

We As An Industry Are In Trouble. 

We as an industry don’t have a scalable solution to the problem.  We as an industry do not know what this will cost, who will pay for it, and to what extent this is an existential risk to CRE capital formation as it has been conducted for the past twenty-five years.Continue Reading Risk Retention: It’s the Fourth Quarter and the Home Team is Getting Glum

You know, there’s never a dull moment when one reports on the regulatory states’ endless and so often fruitless and wrong-headed tinkering with the global economy. So now… let’s talk bail-in. The bail-in regime, which was adopted by all European Union countries (other than Poland) and implemented on January 1, 2016 (European Economic Area (EEA) members Norway, Iceland and Lichtenstein are required to adopt the regime by December 31, 2016), permits European financial regulators to “bail-in” a failing institution by cancelling, writing-down, or converting into equity certain of the institution’s unsecured liabilities. Affected institutions must include a contractual recognition clause in its non-European-law governed contracts, so that all counterparties acknowledge that the institution’s liabilities are potentially subject to bail-in and agree to be bound by them.
Continue Reading Bail-In, or Just Bailing?

globe - 01-16As 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 a product of wisdom and analytic prowess, it remains an important exercise.  It bears repeating that refusing to take a view is actually to make a choice, and a pretty silly one at that.  So as we at Dechert churn through our budgeting and planning process for 2016, we will make some assumptions about the economic environment and adjust our planning accordingly.  Let’s agree, we are going to be wrong about a lot of stuff – maybe everything – but that fact doesn’t excuse the critical need for having a macro view.
Continue Reading If Interesting and Prosperous is a Choice, I’ll Take Door Number Two: Perspectives on 2016

The way the new Basel III High Volatility Commercial Real Estate Lending Rule (HVCRE) was crafted, and is being enforced, is insane. We’ve written about this before.  This is one of the purest examples of the regulatory apparatchik’s mule-headed refusal to look at data or engage with the banking establishment to develop thoughtful and effective rules. I think I saw a thoughtful and effective rule once.
Continue Reading HVCRE: Surrender Is Not An Option

euroFor want of a baker, a job was lost.  For want of a job, the economy was lost.  For want of an economy, the banking system collapsed.  For want of a banking system – well, ultimately Grexit.

Grexit, Grexit, Grexit, Grexit, Grexit, Grexit, (China), Grexit, Grexit. The Greeks will be fine, right?  There is no such thing as contagion, right?  Your lips to God’s ear, please. As I write this, the Greek Parliament has approved the bailout and it looks like an immediate Grexit is off the table, (although the Germans are none too pleased)!  Wonderful.
Continue Reading Grexit Deferred: The End of the Beginning for Greece?

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 transparent is pretty much the same thing as being accused of being an anti-Semite (with notable exceptions for certain parts of the world).  When it was reported recently that Mrs. Clinton had used a private email address as opposed to an official State Department email, someone suggested that this evidenced a lack of transparency.  The democratic establishment shuddered, only matched by the glee over at Fox News.Continue Reading Mrs. Yellen, What in the World Are You Doing?

We here at CrunchedCredit are getting ready, as we do each year at this time, to polish up the palantir and make our predictions and business projections about the coming year.  While it can be a fun exercise, it’s actually serious business.  To start with, you need a macro view of the geopolitical situation, the markets and the economy.  To not start with a macro view is to make a choice, and a bad choice at that. 
Continue Reading Schrodinger’s Cat