Securitization of income-property mortgages continued to post strong new issuance numbers in 2014, with the non-agency commercial MBS sector doing particularly well, according to a new market analysis by Inside MBS & ABS. A total of $164.77 billion of securities backed by commercial mortgages were issued last year, down just 0.6 percent from 2013’s level, which was the high-water mark since just before the financial collapse. And non-agency CMBS production was up 11.6 percent in 2014, at $96.48 billion. Agency MBS issuance fell...[Includes one data chart]
The European Central Bank’s launch of a Fed-like quantitative easing program will likely keep the yield spread flat and interest rates low. The ECB plans monthly purchases of €60 billion in ABS and covered bonds issued by central governments, agencies and banks in the euro zone. U.S. experts have been mulling...
"Contrary to the fable told by the left, the root cause of the financial crisis was not deregulation but dumb regulation," said House Financial Services Committee chairman Jeb Hensarling, R-TX.
Standard & Poor’s agreed this week to a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission and two state attorneys general regarding ratings on commercial MBS and non-agency MBS. Regulators suggest that further actions involving the ratings services are in the works, likely including a much larger settlement with S&P regarding activity before the financial crisis. S&P’s settlement this week involved post-2010 activity. The rating service agreed to pay the SEC and attorneys general for New York and Massachusetts more than $77 million. S&P will also take a one-year “timeout” from rating conduit/fusion commercial MBS. “They lied...
More than a year after issuing ratings for the first-ever single-family rental securitization, Moody’s Investors Service has issued its finalized approach for rating such deals. The rating service is also prepared to rate multi-borrower SFR transactions, a type of deal that has yet to be issued. Moody’s analysis of SFR securitizations was previously based largely on the approach the rating service applies to large loan commercial MBS backed by multifamily housing. The new criteria from Moody’s include...
Risk weights established by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision for holdings of securitized assets won’t have much of an impact on U.S. banks, according to analysts at Barclays Capital. It’s unclear which banks the risk weights will be applied to and many U.S. banks have transitioned to similar methods to evaluate capital requirements for their holdings of MBS and ABS. The BCBS issued a revised framework for calculating risk weights on banks’ securitization exposures in December. The framework is set to take effect in certain countries beginning in 2018. It was issued to address concerns that banks were holding insufficient capital for certain securitized assets and to reduce the reliance on external ratings to derive securitization risk weights. Barclays said...
The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision recently proposed replacing credit ratings with loan-characteristic metrics for determining capital requirements on bank holdings of residential MBS and commercial MBS. Federal regulators in the U.S. note that the proposal is preliminary and any changes to U.S. capital requirements will go through a notice and comment process separate from the BCBS’ activity. The current standardized approach established by Basel for determining capital requirement riskweights prescribes the use of external credit ratings for residential MBS and commercial MBS, among other holdings by banks subject to capital requirements. “While acknowledging that credit rating agencies play an important role in financial markets and that external credit assessments provide valuable information that may assist in the analysis of credit risk exposures, the hard-wiring of external credit assessments into standards, laws and regulations may often lead...
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