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This is all about the difficulty of taking the punch bowl away from a roaring good party. Over the past several weeks a number of major banks folded under enormous pressure from the US DOJ to settle fraud claims resulting from the sale of bonds prior to the financial crisis of 2008. The allegations here were that, as they have been in many many cases over the past several years, the banks knowingly sold bonds backed by crappy residential mortgage loans. Apparently, no one else had a clue that this stuff was crap! Who knew? These last suite of deals were relative bargains for the banks because, reportedly, the DOJ was highly motivated to get these deals done before Mr. Trump took the helm at the White House.

For some reason this calmed investors’ concerns.

I don’t get it.
Continue Reading Hey Guys, Let’s Sue a Financial Institution! Our Government at Play

Closeup of a seismograph machine earthquake

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

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

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

Never a dull moment.  We at Crunched Credit are probably guilty of excess and perhaps myopic focus on our federal government and its regulatory apparatus; it is such a consistently reliable source of commentary and outrage.  So here’s one out of left field, but no less important for that. 
Continue Reading “First” Deeds of Trust now Second in Line?

Last week, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (“FHFA”) has joined the chorus of opponents, expressing “significant concerns about the use of eminent domain to revise existing financial contracts”.  We at CrunchedCredit have recently covered the eminent domain proposals being considered by Chicago and San Bernardino County.
 Continue Reading Eminent Domain Proposals: Federal Housing Finance Agency Concerned

Recently, the Wall Street Journal highlighted the arrival of “bad loan securities.” If this is a trend, and I both hope and think it is, we clearly have to get a better deal name for these than “Insert Bank Name”, Bad Loan Securities 2012-1. Securitization of less than ideal conduit product has been with us since the birth of securitization, but reached its apogee in the RTC series, for non-performing loans, in the early to mid 1990s. That transaction architecture is being revived, and it’s about time. Both Fitch and DBRS have published criteria, or at least guidance and the other agencies are beavering away, busy working with bankers to come up with workable ratings technology.Continue Reading The Return of the Liquidating Trust

On May 5, SIFMA hosted a Spotlight Series: Risk Retention and Qualified Residential Mortgages.  It was immediately apparent that unintended consequences of the proposed risk retention rules (pdf) abound.

The panelists acknowledged that the regulators had a very tough mandate, and that the rules are way more complicated than anticipated.  It was estimated that approximately 60% of the proposed rule will make its way to the final rule, and that while feelings of annoyance with respect to the drafting of the proposed rule may linger, it is up to the securitization market participants to help the regulators provide us with a clear, workable final rule.

Under the proposed rule, calculation of the amount of required risk retention would be based on a percentage of the par value of the ABS interests in an issuing entity.  The discussion began with a couple questions some of us have already been asking …

What do regulators mean by “par value”?  What is an “ABS interest”?Continue Reading SIFMA Spotlight Series: Risk Retention and Qualified Residential Mortgages

Although there is renewed optimism for a vibrant CRE lending market in 2011 (or at least a significantly better market than the prior 3 years), many lenders and servicers continue to face challenges in dealing with delinquent or defaulted commercial mortgage and mezzanine loans (whether held on balance-sheet or securitized). The volume of these “scratch and dent” assets are expected to increase this year and are responsible for continued misfortune by masking positive returns and causing realized losses. Despite this misfortune and the associated headaches, there is appetite in the industry to acquire or aggregate large portfolios of these loans on the cheap, and make a buck or two in the process of restructuring the loans or exercising remedies.Continue Reading Liquidating Trusts: Let’s Detoxify the System at Last