Asset Securitization Report articles from August 2007

Asset Securitization Report archives from August 2007

Whispers.
August 6, 2007... Anxious investors holding RMBS and CDO assets are now expressing their fears in the ABCP sector, according to market sources. Late last week, word circulated that ABCP conduits administered by American Home Mortgage Investment Corp. and Aladdin...

Arrested Issuance Persists as C-BASS Falls: New issuance grinds to a halt as stability eludes indices.
August 6, 2007... MGIC Investment Corp. and Radian Group were not the only stakeholders to lose confidence in the outlook for the subprime market last week. Across the entire consumer ABS spectrum, capital markets investors dug in their heels and held onto their...

Feds Need Shared Goal on Student Loans.
August 6, 2007... Figuring out how to finance a college education is a notoriously confusing and frustrating process. It is not always clear to borrowers exactly how much a loan will cost once it is approved, how much of the debt should be repaid before...

Subprime Contagion Spreads to Prime RMBS?
August 6, 2007... As the subprime RMBS market continues to face uncertainty, prime loans might be hit next - not surprising given the loose underwriting standards that characterize all of the 2006 vintage. These expectations come amid 2006 vintage resets and...

Stable Market Seen for Cell Tower Lease ABS.
August 6, 2007... Business is booming for cell tower lease operators, thanks to the busy lifestyles that prompt Americans to rely more heavily on wireless communication devices, advanced technology that could take advantage of the industry's existing...

Citi Arranges TRS CLO for INVESCO.
August 6, 2007... INVESCO Senior Secured Management (ISSM) plans to close a synthetic CLO early this month, referencing $500 million in high yield bank loans through a series of total return swaps. The deal, Hudson Canyon Loan Fund, is being arranged by...

Barclays Capital's Kvalheim Sheds Light on Firm's 2007 Outlook: Yael Bizouati from ASR's sister publication IDD talks with Barclays Capital's Investment Banking Head who discusses the company's outlook, ABN AMRO, and more.(Interview)
August 6, 2007... Barclays posted robust first-half results last Thursday, earning nearly $8.1 billion, up 12% from last year's first half, and citing its investment banking division as one of the drivers. Grant Kvalheim, co-president of Barclays Capital and...

Senate Bill Could Impact Credit Card Servicer Practices.
August 6, 2007... This May, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) introduced the Stop Unfair Practices in Credit Cards Act (S.1395), pro-consumer legislation that could significantly impact the credit card industry, and which will possibly have a ripple-effect impact on the...

Moody's Alters View on Alt-A and Option ARMs.
August 6, 2007... Moody's Investors Service announced changes to its rating methodology on Alt-A RMBS transactions, including option ARM loans. Separately, Moody's also updated its methodology for rating option ARM loan securitizations. The Alt-A changes...

C-BASS Future Bleak on Margin Calls.
August 6, 2007... C-BASS surprised an already jaded market last week when the company issued a statement acknowledging that it had received a substantial number of margin calls, which would hinder the liquidity of its business. The announcement was prompted...

Spanish Paper Glut Could Send Spreads Wider.
August 6, 2007... The brief August lull might offer only a temporary respite from the widening trend that has hit Spanish RMBS. Despite sound fundamentals in the Spanish economy, supply pressure, coupled with investor weariness over the subprime debacle...

Cross-Border and Chinese Deals Rise in Asian ABS.
August 6, 2007... A decade after the financial crisis that decimated the economies of East Asia, securitization has gained a good deal of momentum in the region, particularly in the domestic markets of several Asian countries. Experts are keeping a keen eye...

S&P Forecasts Higher Volumes for EEMEA in 2007.
August 6, 2007... Standard & Poor's expects securitization issuance in EEMEA - Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa - to keep growing this year, albeit at a slower pace than in 2005 or 2006. In January, S&P predicted that flows in 2007 would climb past the 9.8...

Whispers.
August 13, 2007... Moody's Corp. reorganized its businesses into two divisions. A new division, called Moody's Analytics, will pull Moody's KMV, Moody's Economy.com and other businesses out of its rating agency business, along with the sales and marketing...

Business Bypasses Stalled ABS Market: Investors close liquidity spigot on ABS, send ABCP on rollercoaster ride.
August 13, 2007... This is getting to be a habit. The ABS market remained in a resting state for the third week last week, getting little encouragement from gun-shy investors and with the overall credit market getting only slightly more sympathy from the Federal...

Pinch, Not Panic, for EM Structured Markets.
August 13, 2007... Bear Stearn's encounter with a Standard & Poor's downgrade warning and BNP Paribas' lockdown of three ABS funds served as stark reminders that subprime isn't through with the markets yet. Spreads across the board shifted further out. But...

Long ABX Positions See Value.(asset backed securities index)
August 13, 2007... Amid an endless stream of increasingly bad news in the mortgage market, investors have been shorting the ABX index, expecting further deterioration and hedging their positions in the stagnant CDO arena. However, a growing number of...

Euro ABS Suffers A Cruel Summer.
August 13, 2007... Despite recent optimism among many European investment bankers and analysts, the Euro market has not been weathering U.S. subprime woes as well as anticipated. Their recent contention that there is room for growth in non-real estate asset...

Subprime Mortgages - A Realistic Outlook.
August 13, 2007... Introduction Some market participants seem to be overreacting to the recent rating activity in the subprime mortgage ABS sector. Together, Moody's Investors Service and Standard & Poor's took more than a thousand negative rating actions on...

Subprime Meltdown Continues as Several Companies Go Under.
August 13, 2007... The mortgage market was beginning to look like ducks in a shooting gallery last week after a devastating amount of bad news. The injured participants, C-BASS, NovaStar Financial, American Home Mortgage Investment Co., HomeBanc, Impac Mortgage...

CLOs Slow For Needed R&R.
August 13, 2007... CLO market players will be more discerning about transactions in the second half of this year, according to panelists at a Loan Syndications and Trading Association seminar held in New York last Wednesday. The participants highlighted the...

Liquidity Slowdown Hits ABCP.(asset backed commercial paper)
August 13, 2007... Things will never be the same in the extendible note (EN) portion of the ABCP sector, and that is the way investors want it. The buy-side community made its wishes plain over the past two weeks, firmly refusing to buy much new extendible note...

August Starts Strong Sans Fight-to-Quality Bid.
August 13, 2007... Mortgages are off to a strong start in August. For the month through Aug. 7, the Lehman Brothers MBS Index outperformed Treasurys by 30 basis points. In fact, MBS is outperforming ABS (six basis points over), CMBS (negative 40 basis points) as...

The Debate on Whether to Raise Conforming Limits Continues.
August 13, 2007... The beleaguered MBS market got a reprieve from its problems last week, after Fannie Mae Chief Executive Daniel Mudd heard proposals from OFHEO Director James Lockhart and HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson to raise the OFHEO-imposed cap on GSE...

Fitch's New Rating Method Accounts for Changing RMBS Risk.
August 13, 2007... Fitch Ratings has responded to the subprime market turmoil by revising its criteria for measuring mortgage default and loss risk for newer vintages. The methodology now takes into account current credit risks that have sent the U.S. RMBS market...

Whispers.
August 20, 2007... Standard & Poor's last week lowered its ratings on 50 tranches from 12 U.S. cash flow and hybrid CDO of ABS deals. Forty-seven of these ratings had been on CreditWatch with negative implications before the downgrades. The rating agency removed...

Weak Broad Markets Outdo ABS Woes.
August 20, 2007... Much of the trouble proliferating through the major indices last week could, in part, be traced back to the ABS industry. This is where fast money and high-risk structures fed a long period of growth in the housing market, which many market...

Canadian ABCP Market Feels Liquidity Pinch.
August 20, 2007... Liquidity issues that destabilized the delicately balanced ABCP market in recent weeks migrated north into Canada. Similar to problems that unfolded in the U.S. ABCP market, lack of investor confidence in the debt capital and credit markets...

Subprime and Credit Keep Tight Grip on MBS Sector.
August 20, 2007... Subprime and credit worries continued to insinuate themselves last week into broader areas, such as commercial paper and money management firms. This kept the flight to quality intact, swap spreads moving wider and volatility higher - all not...

Turkey May Securitize Existing Assets in 2008.
August 20, 2007... Moody's Investors Service expects the securitization of existing assets in Turkey to launch in the first quarter of 2008, according to a report by the agency. In March, the Turkish parliament enacted a mortgage law that sets up a framework for...

Amid Turmoil Abroad, a Pivotal RMBS in Brazil.
August 20, 2007... While the subprime meltdown kept reverberating through global credit markets during the past two weeks, a breakthrough transaction quietly priced in Brazil, and ironically, the deal is a securitization of residential mortgages. On August...

Lack of Liquidity Crunches European ABS Market.
August 20, 2007... Panic continues to grip the European ABS market in the wake of the U.S. subprime debacle. While many still claim that this reaction is unreasonable, the liquidity crunch that has inflicted the market has taken the U.S. subprime contagion to...

Euro Cards Meet Volume Expectations.
August 20, 2007... Growth in credit card issuance continues to be pressured by a slowdown in the rise of consumer borrowing and spending. The slowdown was brought on by the increase in interest rates and subdued corporate earnings, which create a higher...

Mortgage Fraud Adds Risk to U.S. RMBS Market.
August 20, 2007... The upsurge in housing over the past few years has given way to an unprecedented amount of questionable activity in the mortgage market, including fraud. And while regulators have ramped up their combative efforts, fraud's growing breadth has...

Subprime Mortgages - A Realistic Outlook.
August 20, 2007... (The is the second installment of a two-part series. The first installment discussed the valuation challenges presented by the current difficult supbrime mortgage environment. This installment focuses on the other valuation complications...

Countrywide Battles with Negative Headlines.
August 20, 2007... The dizzying rate at which Countrywide Financial Corp.'s prospects are changing from bad to worse can make one forget that two weeks ago Washington Mutual's own struggles were sharing headlines. What a difference several days, hours and minutes...

REITs Fuel CDO Trouble at Taberna.
August 20, 2007... U.S. RMBS trouble is brewing for Bermuda-based Taberna Capital Management. The CDO manager, which has issued nine CDOs backed primarily by REITs since its inception in 2005, has been hit with a cluster of negative rating actions. The...

Fannie Mae Business Grows.
August 20, 2007... Fannie Mae acknowledged that 2006 was a tough year for financial results on its 10-K-related conference call last Thursday, announcing that net income declined to $4.1 billion, compared with $6.3 billion in 2005. Net interest income was...

Are Buyers Bluffing on Killing Sallie Mae?
August 20, 2007... In the shadow of an unfriendly and overhung credit market, Sallie Mae shareholders approved a buyout last week that would add as much as $16.5 billion to the leveraged finance pipeline. But don't consider the deal closed just yet. In light of...