Europe

The Dallas-based money manager has launched a UCITS that invests in both U.S. and European loans, investment-grade CLO securities, and obligations and other kinds of structured products.

The $52 billion in year-to-date volume in resets of collateralized loan obligations is nearly outpacing new-paper issuance of $53.5 billion, reports LPC.

Noria 2018-1 is a €1.6 billion securitization of unsecured personal loans, of which 30% are debt consolidation accounts.

The as-yet unsized Volta VI is backed by a tariff on all users of electricity in the nation; it is designed to help EDP, the largest utility, recover the costs of supporting renewable electricity.

According to Morgan Stanley, seven of 15 new European CLOs in the pipeline are debut or re-entry deals involving U.S. asset managers.

The London interbank offered rate has its faults, but at least it compensates for counterparty risk; not so the benchmark being touted as a replacement.

The average AAA note coupon of 103 basis points above Libor widened from 98.4 in March, which had been the tightest CLO spread level in approximately five years.

The €300 million Taurus 2018-1 also finances Italian retail assets that the Partners Group, based in Switzerland, purchased from the Blackstone Group in February.

All of the loans in the £206.6 million deal were funded by institutional investors; the transaction allows these institutions to exit their investments by pooling loans into collateral for bonds.

GCO Finance, a joint venture between AGCO Corp. and DLL, a unit of Rabobank, is marketing its $896.55 million of bonds backed by agricultural and construction loans and leases.

After the second-busiest quarter for primary European CLO issuance to start 2018, a two-week April lull in the market was ended with deal pricings by Intermediate Capital and Investcorp.

With no more concerns about triggering risk retention on its large pile of older deals, Blackstone is dusting off CLO portfolios that have long been eligible for a refi makeover.

Moody's, S&P and DBRS take divergent views of riskiness of €500 Driver Italia One; key concerns are the concentration of loans with balloon payments and lack of recourse to cars being financed.

However the collateral will total at least £370.4 million (US$424.5 million), including a £62.7 million prefunding account; the weighted average coupon of the collateral is 4%.

The U.S. CLO manager breaks the ice with its first euro-denominated deal, which priced Friday and will close in May when it is about 75% ramped up.

The €413.5 million BlackRock European CLO V is the fourth euro-denominated CLO to launch this month, and asset manager's first since BlackRock Euro CLO IV priced in November.

The transaction is backed by 6,857 loans with a total balance of $835 million, or roughly 13% of the $6.4 billion of commercial vehicle and equipment loans in Mercedes-Benz Financial Services USA.

The €413 million transaction will issue exchangeable notes for the five senior tranches, allowing regulated U.S. banks the opportunity to invest, even though the portfolio includes bonds.

It's the busiest start to the year, post-financial crisis, for collateralized loan obligations, according to Thomson Reuters, and nearly 60% higher than the pace set in the first two months of 2017.

Moody's thinks that the risk of early lease terminations is "marginal," since only 0.5% of the vehicles in the collateral pool are old enough to be impacted by bans in place in several European cities.