ACE Limited, a property casualty insurance company, has established its second reinsurance sidecar under the Altair program.

Following a near-record year in over $7-billion of issuance in catastrophe bonds, industry players at a recent roundtable hosted by Standard & Poor’s sounded confident that investors new to the sector are not going to get cold feet if they lose money.

Spreads on commercial mortgage bonds could tighten early this month amid the temporary lull in supply, but analysts at JP Morgan believe that, longer term, supply could push new-issue spreads modestly wider.

U.S. ABS securitization issuance was $180 billion in 2013, down 3% from 2012, according to Thomson Reuters data.

The deals, one from Santander and the other from American Credit, add $1.2 billion to the consumer ABS pipeline.

The delinquency rate for Standard & Poor’s-rated CMBS fell 39 basis points to 7.92% in December.

The Loan Syndications andTrading Association wants federal agencies to consider an exemption for CLOs at the same time it considers one for Trups CDOs.

Reduced participation of bank lenders serving the small business sector has created more opportunities for non-bank specialty finance companies to originate and securitize small business loans

Underwriting may be getting sloppy, but the market for commerical mortgage bonds appears headed for anothe year of issuance growth and declining delinquencies.

Community Bank System in DeWitt, N.Y., will take a $6.9 million loss in the fourth quarter after selling collateralized-debt obligations and other securities in response to concerns over the Volcker Rule.

Lenders wrote off $13.6 billion in student loan debt between January and August, a 46% increase from one year earlier and the highest amount for an equivalent period in eight years, according to Equifax