Consumer ABS

The FDIC held a meeting March 29 to discuss its risk retention rules and the much debated QRM qualification.

Two and a half years after the global financial markets imploded, the dust has begun to settle, providing a clearer view on which sectors of the securitization market will thrive-and which won't.

Despite recent reports of people changes at some of Wall Street's biggest players in the securitization market, finding work, even for experienced hands, is still no easy task.

After the Japanese crisis, CMBS secondary market activity was the most impacted versus all other securitization sectors, experts said.

For 1Q11, U.S. public ABS issuance reached $13.62 billion, according to preliminary figures from the ASR Scorecards database. This is an increase from a year ago when industry volumes reached only $9.4 billion

As the structured finance market struggles to make sense of myriad new rules stemming from the Dodd-Frank Act, it's become clear that rating agency reform initiatives from the regulators have largely been put on hold.

Certain effects of the economic downturn have begun to ease, but one recession-hatched trend persists: Cash-strapped consumers continue to show a preference for paying their credit card bills over their mortgages, TransUnion said.

Educational Funding of the South (Edsouth) is in the market with its 2011-1 Series FFELP-backed student loan ABS deal. The offering is divided into Class A-1 and A-2 as well as Class B notes, which amount to around $1.6 billion ,according to a presale report released by Moody's Investor Service.

Discover Financial Services said it has benefited from making fewer bad loans but said much of its growth may actually come from products other than credit.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is going to allocate half its budget to supervision and enforcement of consumer protection laws with a strong emphasis on non-bank lenders. "We can't enforce the law only against banks that are the easiest to find," said Elizabeth Warren, the leader of Treasury Department's CFPB implementation team. "Instead, we will build a strong enforcement arm that will for the first time ever put significant federal resources behind ensuring compliance by non-bank financial companies."