I’m a great admirer of Jack Cohen and his periodic market commentary. I answered his last one and then after the two of us talked, we decided we’d publish them together as a duet. So here you go.… Continue Reading
As we return to our desks after last week’s whirlwind in Las Vegas for the Structured Finance Industry Group (SFIG) Conference, we find ourselves reflecting on how this conference was at once business as usual while also showing evidence of an evolving industry looking to the future. Approximately 8,050 attendees, including a sizable Dechert team, … Continue Reading
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 … Continue Reading
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 … Continue Reading
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 … Continue Reading
As we begin to close in on the initial implementation of the Risk Retention Rule, we are looking beyond the headlines and trying to figure out how the Rule will actually work. The result is troubling.… Continue Reading
As the CMBS market begins to get its feet underneath it, a number of folks have begun to pine for the public markets. Since 2009, every CMBS deal has been issued as a 144A (or otherwise privately placed). The public market is beginning to feel like a memory. While there seems to have been relatively … Continue Reading
Well, we now have our proposed risk retention rule. The regulator class has been incubating this egg for the better part of nine months and we’re all now well behind the, admittedly, magical thinking schedule proposed in the actual FinReg legislation. Now, I’m not complaining. Particularly having read this missive, I’m all into delay. If … Continue Reading
On January 20th, the SEC finalized its first batch of many rules to come under Dodd-Frank, requiring issuers to perform reviews of the assets underlying their ABS securities and requiring them to disclose fulfilled and unfulfilled repurchase requests for alleged breaches of representations and warranties. These have effective dates beginning with 2012 issuance so, to a certain extent, we can kick the anxiety … Continue Reading
Somehow, particularly this year, the fact that election eve and All Hallow’s Eve arrive but three days apart seems so compellingly appropriate. Both are scary and both involve an awful lot of people pretending to be something they’re not. But elections are supposed to have consequences while Halloween does not. So let’s test that. Does … Continue Reading
The gestation of CMBS 2.0 continues apace. A slow pace. The bulk of the deals look an awful lot like CMBS 1.0, but at least one, the Goldman/Citi deal, seemed to come right out of the playbook of the activist investment grade ad hoc committee that has been fulminating for fundamental change in the structure … Continue Reading
It seems that I use most of my time in this space to rail against an unthoughtful regulatory architecture that will certainly surprise and may ultimately do unintended and substantial harm to our nascent and uncertain recovery. While, from where I sit, it’s still fair to say this market continues to show little real conviction … Continue Reading
It’s August 6 as I write this, and the finance industry is taking a deep breath after hustling for weeks to get their comments delivered to the SEC on the SEC’s massive restructuring (pdf) of Reg AB and offering reform. We here at Dechert had been very busy writing the CREFC comments (pdf) and I’m delighted to … Continue Reading
Today the American Bankers Association will publish its Summary and Analysis of the Regulatory Reform Conference Report. The project will provide detailed summaries of each title of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act conference report, as well as analysis of which entities will be affected and how. The conference report has been … Continue Reading
Back from vacation … The sheer joy of re-engagement cannot be captured in words. But, can there be a better way of restarting than perusing FinReg? Being the parochial structured finance lawyer that I am, I start with Subtitle D with the Potemkin village-like name of "Improvements to the Asset Backed Securitization Process" and Section … Continue Reading
The push for covered bond legislation – left on the cutting room floor when Fin Reg. was finalized during a marathon session last week (or should I say finalized subject to Senator Scott Brown’s continuing review) – is coming under renewed discussion by Congress (led by Representative Scott Garret) and the FDIC. The FDIC balked … Continue Reading
