CMBS

David Stevens arrived as a commissioner at the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in 2009 vowing to restore financial discipline to a government housing body facing the stresses of a post-crash world.

The CMBS market continues to feel the ripple effect of last week's announcement from Standard & Poor's that it would stop rating new conduit/fusion CMBS deals, with yet another transaction pulled from the market because of the rating agency's move.

The debt ceiling compromise will bring some temporary relief to the securitization market, although the benefits will likely be short-lived.

In July, more than $1.3 billion in CMBS conduit loans were resolved with losses, Trepp said today in a report.

At the recent American Securitization Forum (ASF) Sunset Seminar, panelists looked back at the first year of Dodd-Frank, saying regulators are still missing the bigger picture.

Europe's reenactment of last summer's sovereign debt crisis heated up as talks of a Greek debt default intensified once again this July.

Greek bailout talks intensified once again this July, a repeat in many ways of last summer's discussions. But structured finance issuance is taking it much harder this year, as Nora Colomer examines in the cover story. In July two actively marketed European securitizations were abruptly pulled when the market got too volatile. Other issuers went the retained route rather than face the risks associated with bringing new-issue deals to market.

Bank regulators expressed frustration July 27 over a little-noticed and initially uncontroversial provision of Dodd-Frank that forces them to eliminate references to credit ratings in most bank regulations.

CMBS 2.0 has taken off and is getting normalized, with even a $685 million deal backed entirely by hotel properties passing muster.

Standard & Poor's has announced, in connection with its advanced notice of proposed criteria change, that it will not be assigning ratings to CMBS transactions that are using its U.S. conduit/fusion criteria.