CDOs/CLOs

Buysiders speaking at an investor roundtable panel said that understanding ABS collateral is key to structured finance recovery.

There remains value in certain European ABS sectors despite their risk profile, said panelists at the Association for Financial Markets in Europe’s (AFME) and the Information Management Network’s Global ABS 2011 conference being held in Brussels this week.

Goldman Sachs has launched a $301.5 million CLO to be managed by PineBridge Investments, according to sources.

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision finalized its review of the Basel III standard for capital treatment for counterparty credit risk in bilateral trades and plans to modify the risk weighting of credit valuation adjustment (CVA), which is the risk of loss caused by changes in the credit spread of a counterparty due to changes in its credit quality.

The government is a month into selling its AIG holdings. Despite the bids for the auctions being pre-announced, the sales are causing a commotion in the RMBS secondary market, and the reaction from securitization players is not entirely positive.

The Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) proposal issued May 18 to implement rules mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act tasks rating agencies with measures most have sought to address, but the proposal's detailed requirements could instead overwhelm smaller agencies.

Vendors anticipated hearing May 27, the Friday after ASR's deadline, whether they could bid on the contract to build and operate a repository to collect and make available data for loans backing European RMBS, a project several steps ahead of a similar effort in the U.S.

ING closed a CLO for more than $400 million, according to sources. Almost $2 billion in new CLOs have priced in May.

Babson Capital has joined a growing list of money management firms starting closed-end loan funds. In Babson’s case, the fund will invest in leverage loans and high yield bonds in both North America and Western Europe.

The American Securitization Forum (ASF) will have Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Mary Schapiro as keynote speaker at its 2011 annual meeting in Washington, D.C. on June 22.