Most securities issuers and investors who attended this week’s American Securitization Forum ASF 2013 conference in Las Vegas were optimistic about the market. “We are seeing demand that we have not seen in years,” said Michael Binz, a managing director and business leader of North America ABS at Standard & Poor’s. Binz noted that the mood at the conference a year ago was starkly different, with fewer investors, diminishing supply and regulatory uncertainty. About 5,660 people registered to attend the conference this year, up from 5,000 last year, according to Tom Deutsch, executive director of the ASF. Deutsch noted...
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The government-sponsored enterprises are working several different risk-transfer pilots and will soon issue the securities, according to officials at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Non-agency MBS investors appear eager for the securities, though a number of regulatory concerns remain, including complications with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Patrick Lawler, chief economist at the FHFA, said a risk-sharing transaction will hopefully be issued in the “not too distant future.” Speaking at the American Securitization Forum’s ASF 2013 conference this week in Las Vegas, Lawler and other officials with the FHFA and GSEs said risk-sharing transactions are a high priority this year. “The commitment is...
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Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have created a limited prototype of their somewhat controversial standardized securitization platform and are working to address industry feedback, according to officials at the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the government-sponsored enterprises. Speaking at the American Securitization Forum’s ASF 2013 conference this week in Las Vegas, Patrick Lawler, chief economist at the FHFA, said a limited prototype of the securitization platform has been developed. Wanda DeLeo, deputy director of the FHFA’s office of strategic initiatives, said the GSEs continue to work on the prototype, which is based largely on the architecture outlined in an October white paper from the FHFA. The white paper received...
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A major surge in the securitization of student loans helped push overall non-mortgage ABS issuance up 65.9 percent during the fourth quarter of 2012, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS ranking and analysis. Total non-mortgage ABS issuance climbed to $147.0 billion in 2012, up 15.9 percent from the previous year. It was the strongest market for ABS securitization since 2009, but still trailed the levels reached prior to the financial market collapse in 2008. ABS backed by retail vehicle financing were...[Includes two data charts]
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Nationstar Mortgage this week priced $300 million of asset-backed notes in what the company called “the first ever” securitization of collateral backed by agency servicing advances, a sign that nonbanks are beginning to see more liquidity for mortgage servicing rights. The yield on the Nationstar paper is an attractive 1.46 percent. The term is three years. And in another development in the same market, Home Loan Servicing Solutions, which is affiliated with Ocwen Financial, has signaled...
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A credit rating agency has agreed to be barred for 18 months from rating asset-backed and government securities issuers, while a former broker-dealer executive has been charged with duping investors in connection with the sale of MBS. Egan-Jones Ratings Co. and its owner/president, Sean Egan, have agreed to the temporary prohibition as part of a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly “making willful and material misstatements and omissions” while registering with the SEC to become a nationally recognized statistical ratings organization for ABS and government securities. The SEC discovered...
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Wall Street’s ability to hide and disguise significant risk through the abuse of derivatives and other “novel financial products” would be greatly reduced under a proposed modernization of tax rules issued last week by the Republican head of a top House committee. The “discussion draft” released by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Rep. Dave Camp, R-MI, would revamp, among other things, the tax treatment of bonds traded at a discount or premium on the secondary market, increase the accuracy of determining gains and losses on securities sales and prevent harvesting of tax losses on securities. “Updating these tax rules to reflect modern developments in financial products will make...
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Federal regulators faced with finalizing controversial rules on risk retention in non-agency MBS, ABS and commercial MBS transactions of the future are considering a “fair-value” approach instead of the controversial premium capture cash reserve account. Although no details on the proposal are available, the American Securitization Forum recently provided general views on how fair value calculations of an issuer’s risk-retention requirement could replace the PCCRA. The group said the change could be “a significant improvement” over the PCCRA, which could have wreaked havoc on the securitization market. The PCCRA, which would have required issuers to hold in reserve any premium they earned in selling assets to a securitization trust, was...
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Secondary market investors interested in branching out beyond plain vanilla mortgage products are not going to have much to get excited about once the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s new ability-to-repay rule kicks in next year, top legal experts suggested this week. “Will lenders make rebuttable presumption qualified mortgages? Remember, [lenders] are free to make loans that generally satisfy the ATR standard. We don’t think those are going to be very common. We don’t think they are going to be saleable in the secondary market at this point in time from what we know today,” Donald Lampe, leader of the financial services regulatory and compliance practice with the Dykema law firm, told participants in a webinar hosted by Inside Mortgage Finance, an affiliated newsletter. As he sees it, the real issue boils down...
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