Two senior executives have joined Societe Generale's debt capital markets (DCM) team in Europe. Ralf Grossmann joins as head of covered bonds for Europe, a new role, and Christian Rose joins the bank as director of DCM, Nordic origination, according to Societe Generale. Grossman was director of fixed-income and credit research at Ixis Corporate and Investment Bank in Paris. Grossmann will be based in Frankfurt and report to the global head of DCM origination for financial institutions, Demetrio Salorio, and to the head of DCM origination for Germany, Austria and Switzerland, Maik Laske. Rose succeeds Camiel Van-Steekelenburg as director of Nordic DCM origination, based in London. He will cover the Scandinavian and Benelux regions and report to Van-Steekelenburg, who is now head of DCM for the UK, Benelux and Scandinavia. Rose was previously a director in the DCM financial institutions group at ABN Amro.
Marlin Leasing Corp., which provides small businesses with equipment leases and services related to working capital, completed a $400 million term ABS deal recently, called Marlin Leasing Receiveables XI, LLC. Separately, Standard & Poor's upgraded credit ratings on four classes of subordinated notes from Marlin Leasing Receivables 2004-1 and 2005-1 securitizations.
International law firm Mayer Brown is expanding its global business with the promotion of 43 people worldwide. In the U.S., Gianluca Bacchiocchi was made partner in Mayer Brown's Chicago office. Bacchiocchi represents issuers, underwriters and swap counterparties in public and private issuances ABS deals. In the Charlotte office, partnerships were extended to Michael Mascia, who specializes in securitizations, commercial paper conduit transactions, as well as CDOs, and CLOs, and to Gregory Ruback, who works in leveraged lending. Overseas, 16 attorneys were made partners in Mayer Brown's European business. Among them is, Stephen Day, who will work in securitizations, including structuring and establishing commercial paper conduits and structured investment vehicles, multi-country trade receivables securitizations, intellectual-property financings and whole-business securitizations.
Barclays Capital announced the launch of a family of local currency Emerging Market Government Inflation-Linked Bond benchmark indices. The individual indices track the performance of inflation-linked bonds, issued by the sovereign governments of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Poland, South Korea and Turkey. These indices (along with the preexisting Barclays/BESA South African Inflation-Linked Bond Index) will then be used to create indices tracking debt within Latin America, Asia and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa. Afterward, all of these component indices are rolled up to form the Emerging Market Government Inflation-Linked Bond benchmark index, Barclays said, adding that this is the first time a full family of indices has been available to asset managers and institutional investors looking for a representative benchmark for government inflation-linked debt within developing nations.
DBRS released its Canadian RMBS model last week, continuing its efforts to increase the transparency of its rating process. The model release follows an industry study published in May 2007 entitled "Residential Mortgages and Securitization in Canada: Overview of the Mortgage Market." DBRS said it also expects to publish a Canadian residential mortgage securitization methodology prior to the end of 2007, which will detail the analytical factors evaluated for transaction analysis. New additions include the evaluation of postal codes, market value decline analysis, the classification of loans as urban, suburban, tertiary or rural based on their postal codes, seasoning, large loan classification and analysis, geographic concentration and absolute size of the cross-collateralized pool, DBRS said. A granular penalty factor is applied to pools smaller than $250 million, and a credit is given to pools over $250 million.
Algorithmics appointed Joe Balkovec, an original founder of the Algorithmics collateral solutions, to help provide additional help to collateral clients through the next stage of growth. Balkovec is returning to Algorithmics from Northbound Solutions, a consulting and software company that specializes in securitization. While at Northbound, the new appointee helped to strategically expand the organization. Previously, Balkovec was a cofounder and managing partner of Sentry Financial Systems, a global financial services software firm focused on collateral management for derivative trading institutions. This was prior to Sentry's sale in 2001 to Algorithmics. Balkovec then continued as a managing director with Algorithmics, focusing on software development and sales of the credit risk collateral product.
Northern Rock has strenuously denied press reports that it will axe 2,000 jobs, following its recent funding crisis that sparked the first bank run in England's recent memory. The bank recently increased the amount of money borrowed from the Bank of England from GBP15.9 billion ($32.87) to GBP20.6 billion. "This means that the lender has, to date, borrowed almost half as much from the Bank of England as it has raised from the Granite mortgage master trust," said Deutsche Bank analysts. The fact that more parties are showing interest and making solid efforts toward a takeover, most notably a new bid from GMAC's Cerebus Capital, is good news for Northern Rock investors.
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