Carrington Capital Management has hired Diane Citron, Esq to work in its Stamford, Conn. offices as general counsel and chief compliance officer, reporting to President and General Partner Bruce Rose. Citron was partner at law firm Mayer Brown Rowe & Maw, where she worked for 13 years and co-headed the structured finance practice alongside Stuart Litman and Jason Kravit.
Fieldstone Investment Corp. announced that Senior Vice President-Chief Financial Officer Robert Partlow has resigned from his position due to personal and family reasons. Partlow, who has been with Fieldstone since August 2003, will remain with Fieldstone until August 5. "Fieldstone has accomplished a great deal in the past two years - successfully completing a $700 million private offering, becoming a NASDAQ-listed company and solidly executing its business strategy of building a portfolio of loans held for investment financed by issuing mortgage-backed securitization debt," Partlow said in a statement.
Fitch Ratings announced that Wit Solberg, a director in the agency's U.S. CMBS group will take up the position of head of non-Japan Asian structured finance in its Asian structured finance group. Based in Hong Kong, Solberg replaces Ben McCarthy, who will assume the newly created role of head of real estate investment trust and property trust ratings for Asia Pacific. Additionally, associate director Tino Jang has been transferred from the financial institutions group to cover Taiwanese structured finance. Charles Chang, formerly of the corporate ratings team, will cover international structured finance from the Hong Kong office, while Zhou Jie joins as an associate director in Beijing.
SG Corporate & Investment Banking announced plans to offer U.S. leveraged finance services in the U.S. Based in New York, the business will report dually to Powell Robinson, head of financing for the Americas, and Rene de Laigue, global head of leveraged & acquisition finance. The 10-person team, will consist of U.S. leveraged financiers with SG CIB staff members to be transferred from its European leveraged finance franchise.
Residential Capital Corp. closed its $4 billion private senior note offering last week, consisting of $1 billion of floating-rate notes due 2007; $2.5 billion of 6.375% notes due 2010; and $500 million of 6.875% notes due 2015. ResCap intends to use the net proceeds from this offering to repay indebtedness owed to its parent company, General Motors Acceptance Corp., as well as for general corporate purposes. Banc of America Securities, Bear Stearns, Citigroup Global Markets and JPMorgan Securities made up the selling group for the deal, which was rated BBB' by Fitch Ratings, Baa3' by Moody's Investors Service and BBB-' by Standard & Poor's.
The ARM share of mortgages outstanding dropped to 30% - the lowest it has been in 12 months - from a record high of roughly 37% in March. Merrill Lynch analysts expect the downward trend to continue, particularly as originators roll out more products, such as the 40-year mortgage and fixed-rate IOs, which offer fixed rates featuring the same low monthly payments. RBS Greenwich Capital said that this drop is a quarter-end phenomenon and suggest investors move into hybrids.
Last week the Treasury Department told Congress that the Bush administration is against the extension of the current version of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002, explaining that extending the Act as it is now would stifle further insurance market innovation. CMBS analysts from Fitch Ratings warned against the adverse impact of discontinuing the Act. "Without some means to enable insurers to quantify their exposure, it is unlikely that terrorism insurance will be as readily available and cost effective as it is today, " said Susan Merrick, a managing director at Fitch. "Therefore, Fitch sees the potential for ratings volatility in CMBS bonds and disruption to the new issue CMBS market."
The Monetary Authority of Singapore made amendments last week to a scheme introduced last October to give tax incentives to securitization issuers (see ASR 10/4/04). Initially, domestic special purpose vehicles were considered tax neutral for the period between receiving income and paying expenses. Effective July 1, the revisions mean SPVs will now be exempt from income tax for the period going from February 2004 through the end of 2008. In addition, payments made by SPVs for over the counter financial derivatives used in securitization deals will also be tax exempt, while SPVs can also claim 76% back on goods and services tax paid on business expenses.
Moody's Investors Service announced that it will change its ratings methodology for modeling correlations for CDOs backed by structured finance instruments (see related story p. 10). Specifically, Moody's will now base its correlation assumptions on a proprietary Directional Ratings Transition Matrix to derive a set of asset correlations across structured finance asset types. Previously, Moody's had based its assumptions on default correlations derived from a combination of model-based simulations - its Diversity Score.
"This approach was limited by the lack of available structured finance default data at the time," the agency said in a release. Moody's opted to revise its structured finance correlation assumptions after migrating to the Monte Carlo Simulation approach used by its CDOROMTM model. The new asset correlations have already been integrated into the latest version of its model, which was officially released last November. Moody's also the agency expects to publish a separate report in the very near future describing how this new information is being integrated.
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