Regulatory Reform

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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

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.
Continue Reading Dodd-Frank Rulemaking Developments by the Fed for Fed-Supervised Insurance Firms

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

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?

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?

Last week, the House Committee on Financial Services reported out the Preserving Access to CRE Capital Act of 2016 (the “bill”) in a remarkably bipartisan sort of way (paving the way for: “Well, yes, I did vote for it, but then I voted against it.”).  The bill, which was drafted and backed by CREFC, would exempt certain single asset/single borrower securitizations from the risk retention requirements, would allow the B-piece buyer to acquire the risk retention piece in a senior/subordinate capital structure and loosen the criteria for a qualified commercial real estate loan to make it more useful for CMBS players endeavoring to meet the risk retention requirements of Dodd-Frank.  See Dechert’s OnPoint for a more detailed description of the bill.
Continue Reading Flash: Congress Fixes the CMBS Risk Retention Problem (Just Kidding)

The 2016 CRE Finance Council Industry Leaders Conference, held this week in Miami, was dominated by two topics– risk retention and liquidity. Almost all the forums, panels and presentations at the conference were overshadowed by the specter of risk retention and more general concerns about liquidity.  
Continue Reading CREFC Industry Leaders Conference 2016

In an uninteresting turn of events last week, Congress has passed the Omnibus Bill, which contained a provision extending the EB-5 program until September 30, 2016, with no other changes to the program. As previously discussed, the last couple of months have been filled with substantial discussions and the introduction of potential legislation aimed at reforming the program, but at the end of the day, Congress has decided to “kick the can down the road” for another couple of months.
Continue Reading With Its End in Sight, EB-5 Survives!

capitalEarlier this year we discussed the uncertain future of the EB-5 Visa Program, one of the most successful inbound investment programs of recent years, as evidenced by the $5.2 billion dollars the program has generated in the past ten years alone. Although the EB-5 Visa Program was set to expire on September 30, 2015, Congress approved a temporary extension that allowed the program to continue through December 11, 2015. But notwithstanding the growing popularity and success of the program and the enthusiasm about it from US domestic developers and property owners, it has always engendered some concerns and criticism.  And so, here in early December, its future hangs in the balance. Supporters say the program should be renewed because it generates employment opportunities and funds domestic businesses that rely on these types of investments, but critics claim the program is poorly regulated and tainted by fraud and a certain odor of unseemliness. With the potential expiration of the program set to occur later this week, it is uncertain whether the program will lapse, become permanent, be temporarily extended “as is”, or extended with significant reformations.
Continue Reading The Death of EB-5 Has Been Greatly Exaggerated