CDOs/CLOs

On Friday, April 8, as many in the financial world were fixated on the second round of The Master's, Ford Motor Co. was lowering its earnings outlook for the year and pulling in the reins on the $3 billion auto ABS deal it introduced to the market the previous day.

In response to the bulging proportion of floating-rate issues in the ABS market, Lehman Brothers plans to launch its first ever U.S. ABS Floating Rate Index. The index, initially covering $253 billion worth of transactions, is scheduled to go live May 1.

PNC Financial Services Group is positioning itself to issue equipment lease ABS. Steve Geis, managing director at PNC, said the bank is attempting to increase the size of its equipment-lease warehousing facilities through talks with a number of equipment finance companies. Once it has expanded those facilities adequately, the bank plans to begin issuing term deals in the sector. Geis declined to name the companies or give a timeframe for the first possible deal.

The U.S. primary ABS market was in bloom last week, pricing roughly $9.6 billion as of Thursday evening. The home equity sector accounted for over $6 billion in new issues, including two deals well over the $2 billion mark.

As its parent's corporate debt rating teeters on the brink of junk status, General Motors Acceptance Corp. will tap the ABS market with a $1.5 billion auto lease offering, marking GMAC's first foray into the auto lease sector. The deal is structured with a novel three-tiered, true-sale process which buffers it from the dual headline risk of GMAC's declining credit quality and the potential of a Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. asset seizure in the event of a bankruptcy.

As auto ABS spreads widen and corporate concerns about industry giants like General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. pervade the market, researchers at Morgan Stanley have jumped into the fray to compare the performance of ABS deals from all major issuers. In a nearly 200-page report issued last week, Morgan Stanley not only sizes up the issuers themselves, but also provides individual deal performance metrics for nearly every auto deal currently in the market.

Automobile industry analysts with Morgan Stanley put forth a bearish outlook for the auto sector on a conference call held last week, forecasting weak cash flows for the first quarter and sluggish global demand.

Funding agreement-backed note issuance levels reached a record $11.8 billion in the first quarter of 2005 according to a Standard & Poor's Ratings Services' research report. The numbers reflected a 70% increase from volume reported in 4Q04 and an 11% raise compared with the same quarter the previous year, SunAmerica Life Insurance Co. was the largest issuer of funding agreement-backed notes year-to-date with $2.3 billion of issuance. Allstate Life Insurance Co. followed in second place with $1.1 billion and General Electric Capital Assurance Co. came in third with $300 million in total volume generated, the report added.

By Erkan Erturk, Phd, director and Tom Gillis managing director in the S&P structured finance group

Year to date as of 04/14 Term (days) 04/08 04/11 04/12 04/13 04/14 1-week