Risk Retention

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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 create clarity and allow our business to pivot around this new set of rules so it can continue to thrive.  I think all of us in the finance world are justifiably proud of the fact that if we are given a set of rules, we’ll figure out how to conduct business.  But the uncertainty here is freezing everyone in place, a giant front court pick that we can’t seem to get around.  But one thing is certain and that is that Christmas Eve is coming and with it this Rule will become effective.  After having obsessed about the Risk Retention Rule for years now, we are broadly no closer to clarity about how one should play in the soon to be upon us risk retention world.
Continue Reading A Report From the Risk Retention Front-Lines

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?

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…

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

Over the past few years, the ABS Vegas conference has been the place for industry participants to congratulate each other on a job well done (most recently on a record-setting 2015 for CLO primary issuance), meet-and-greet with clients and generally unwind, making sure to sprinkle a few “important” meetings across the three-day span.  However, following a January and February where CLO primary issuance was down well over 50% year-over-year with little sign of an upturn before the conference, most of us went into ABS Vegas 2016 with uneasy feelings.
Continue Reading Observations from ABS Vegas: The CLO Perspective

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)

RRWe may be approaching a tipping point where the burden of the new federal regulatory state, purportedly designed to make our economy stronger by making the banking system safer, will begin to demonstrably become a cure that’s worse than the disease. To my eye, much of the new regulatory apparatus feels like political theatre designed to impress the financial illiterate. Random chest thumping for populist cred on the cynical assumption that the system is big enough and robust enough to tolerate all this tampering.   Of course, I could be wrong and our policy elites could really be doing all this fiddling from an honest embrace of a simplistic, jejune analysis of extremely complex systems which they largely do not understand. I’m not sure which explanation scares me more.
Continue Reading Risk Retention and the Regulatory State: What It Means to “The Folks” in 2016 and Beyond

Golden_turkey-01As is our tradition here at Crunched Credit, each year, about this time, we award our Golden Turkey Awards.  Once again, I must say that we are blessed, blessed with so many worthy candidates.  Our government, our courts, the regulatory estate both here and in Europe and around the world and the political class in general have once again vied with verve and imagination and breathtaking persistence to win a spot on our acclaimed list.  For those of you who we must disappoint, please accept our heartfelt apologies.  Yes, you screwed up and did stupid things breathtakingly well, just not as well as this year’s winners.
Continue Reading CrunchedCredit.com’s 6th Annual Golden Turkey Awards