Well, it’s been an interesting week and a bit. First Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank were closed by their respective State banking authorities with the FDIC stepping in as receiver and then the extraordinary action by the Fed and Treasury to address liquidity concerns and a bunch of rather disingenuous assurances from the great and … Continue Reading
Welcome, dear reader, to our annual Golden Turkey Awards. But for my commitment to absolute fairness and concern over the appearance of impropriety, I would have awarded the first Golden Turkey Award to Dechert for actually getting the Golden Turkey Awards done this year. What a crazy year end. The market is insane. On the … Continue Reading
Here is something helpful that has surfaced amidst the fallout, pain and confusion of the global COVID-19 crisis. The implementation date for the all-too-simple in theory but not-simple-at-all in practice CECL accounting standard has been pushed back by the passage of the CARES Act for banks until the COVID-19 national emergency declared by the president … Continue Reading
Beany & Cecil was a cartoon. The Current Expected Credit Loss accounting rules, better known as CECL, which the FASB is insisting will go into effect at the beginning of next year for publicly traded banks and lenders and a year later for all other GAAP reporting entities is not. Now, heaven forfend that I … Continue Reading
On March 15, the day the Japanese Financial Services Agency (the “JFSA”) published its final risk retention rules, Dechert’s CLO team published an OnPoint discussing the new final Japanese risk retention rules and their impact on the CLO market. … 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
In February, the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled in The Loan Syndications and Trading Association v. Securities and Exchange Commission and Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, No. 17-5004 (D.C. Cir. Feb. 9, 2018) (the “LSTA decision”) that a manager of an open market CLO is not required to retain risk under the … Continue Reading
South Beach played host to the 2018 CREFC January Conference last week, as roughly 1,800 of our best friends in the CRE lending and securitization industry assembled in Miami to reflect on another year gone by and to muse about what’s in store (or out of store, in the case of retail) for 2018. In … Continue Reading
Or maybe not. At the outset, let’s give credit where credit is due. It was gratifying to read a governmental missive on the capital markets that made sense, showed an actual grasp of how markets function and an awareness of the issues confronting capital formation. Best damn thing I ever read coming out of the … Continue Reading
As an industry, we remain in high dudgeon over the inanity of much of Dodd-Frank, the ideological and often unhinged regulatory instincts of our various governments and the vast amount of effort, time and money it takes to comply with the mind-numbing complexity of rules and regulations that seem to be largely untethered from the … Continue Reading
A standalone securitization of a portfolio of properties closed in June. To our knowledge, this was the first transaction in recent memory done in a direct issuance format. In this case, direct issuance means that the sponsor organized the lender and the depositor as well as a borrower and crafted the loan between the lender and … Continue Reading
What in the world have we done to ourselves? Our CRE Securitization business, or at least the conduit part of our business, continues to shrink: $800 billion in outstanding principal balance in 2007 and now, $400 billion? Maybe, right now, we’re at a run rate of $50 billion per year. Is that enough? Does that … Continue Reading
CREFC held its Annual Conference last week in Washington D.C. Given the current politically charged climate, 2017 felt like a very appropriate time to move the Annual Conference from its traditional home in New York to Washington. Although attendance was down slightly from last year, over 1000 people attended the conference. Dechert hosted a reception … Continue Reading
John Cleese, one of the great classic philosophers of the mid-twentieth century, made that inauspicious (from the perspective of the Shop Keeper) observation, “This parrot is dead!” To which Michael Palin responded that it was merely resting. (It’s better in drag and with the East Ender accent, but you get the idea.) The Parrot skit … Continue Reading
What if Dodd-Frank and Basel III were to largely go away? Eliminating Dodd-Frank has been a hobbyhorse of Representative Hensarling, the chair of the House Services Committee, for several years and has figured prominently in President Trump’s campaign talking points. But the conventional wisdom has been that any sort of transformational uprooting of the Dodd-Frank … Continue Reading
The 2017 CREFC January Conference, which took place last week at the Loews Miami Beach Hotel, provided an opportunity for those in the commercial real estate finance industry to reflect on an eventful 2016, and look ahead to 2017. Although attendance was down by almost 11% this year (we’ll blame Zika), around 1,600 people attended … Continue Reading
As is our tradition here at Crunched Credit, each year, about this time, we present our Golden Turkey Awards. In a year of monumentally bad surprises, we truly had difficulty narrowing our list down to only the exceptionally worthy candidates. Voters, governments and regulators sent shockwaves throughout the world in 2016, upending markets and throwing … Continue Reading
This commentary is not customarily about politics, although those with a subtle cast of mind might get an inkling of some my personal views from my always dry and balanced language. However, right now, it’s hard not to think explicitly about politics and the new Trump administration.… Continue Reading
As we are just inking one of the very first pre-risk retention effective date risk retention deals (Potemkin Village anyone?), we are also seeing an increased flow of what are generically referred to as CRE CLOs. It’s time to consider how the Risk Retention Rule (the “Rule”) will apply to this growing market technology.… Continue Reading
Although registration was up this year for IMN’s 22nd Annual ABS East conference held at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach earlier this month, attendance was lower than it’s been in previous years as many industry participants decided against attending due to concerns about the recent Zika outbreak in Miami. The CLO sector, however, continued to be … Continue Reading
Your correspondent is fresh from the front-lines of the risk retention wars where great armies of lawyers, bankers and advisers are fixedly staring at each other, staring out of the redoubts of their respective defensive crouches in a complex, multidimensional chess game. All are fervently hoping against hope that something or someone does something to … 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
On June 6, 2016, the Rapporteur of the European Parliament released a draft legislative resolution to modify EU Risk Retention. The stated goal of this draft is to promote “Simple, Transparent and Standardized” (STS) securitization. Since STS securitization assets must be fully self-liquidating, commercial real estate (CRE) is again left out in this proposal; not including … Continue Reading
