ABS

Structured finance investors would prefer to rely on fewer sources of pricing for tracking deals, according to 107 investors in the industry surveyed by Principia Partners.

The European DataWarehouse came in for some criticism at Information Management Network’s and Association for Financial Markets in Europe’s Global ABS 2012 conference, which is being held in Brussels this week.

Expectations for an effort to rebrand Europe’s securitization industry, making it more acceptable to regulators and investors, are decidedly mixed.

Discover Financial Services, Riverwoods, Ill., has finally closed on its purchase of LendingTree Loans, also known as Home Loan Center, from Charlotte, N.C.-based Tree.com for a total purchase price of $46 million. An additional $10 million of the purchase price is due on the first anniversary of the purchase, subject to certain conditions.

Global ABS 2011 – Today kicks off Information Management Network’s (IMN) Global ABS 2012 in Brussels. The conference will be held until Thursday, June 14.

A federal judge ruled in favor of two investors involved in litigation against Bank of America, offering an alternative insiders see as a self-help way to mitigate conflicts of interest between lenders and investors of asset-backed commercial paper.

Matthew S. Feig has hopped over to Stroock & Stroock & Lavan from Cadwalder, Wickersham & Taft. He was started June 7 in the N.Y. office as special counsel in the structured finance and insurance practice groups.

Catastrophe bond issuer Long Point Re III has issued a catastrophe bond worth $250 million, according to a release from GC Securities, which structured the deal. The shop was also a joint bookrunner with Swiss Re Capital Markets. BNP Paribas and Aon Benfield Securities acted as co-managers.

If enacted by U.S. regulators as currently drafted, the Simple Supervisory Formula Approach (SSFA) would require banks to give capital risk weightings to securitizations that are sharply higher than those assessed under the longstanding ratings-based approach, according to a presentation by Brian P. Lancaster, co-head of structured transactions at RBS, and John Jordan, from the bank’s financial institutions division.

As the possibility of Greece’s exit from the Eurozone heightens, Moody’s Investors Service today announced that it downgraded the ratings of four Greek covered bond programs. The main catalyst for these downgrades was Moody’s lowering of its Greek country ceiling to ‘Caa2.’

The International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) has recommeded high-level international standards for the regulation of market participants that are in the business of dealing, making a market or intermediating transactions in over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives.

Proposed legislation covering Canadian covered bonds will increase the structural requirements for achieving triple-A, according to Nicolas Malaterre, senior director of covered bonds at Standard & Poor’s.

Despite intense volatility buffeting the Eurozone in recent months, Bank of America Merrill Lynch sees long-term strengths in the region’s structured finance space.

The U.S. hurricane season is only just getting underway, but so far this year, insured damage from tornado activity and other global catastrophes is running well below the same time last year, according to Guy Carpenter.

Fitch Ratings said in a press release Tuesday that the California Proposition 29, the Tobacco Tax for Cancer Research Act, could reduce payments that all states receive from the Tobacco companies under the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement (MSA).

In a short note released this morning, Standard & Poor's analysts said that benchmark European covered bond issuance was €12.5 billion in May, up from €6.6 billion in April.

European issuers of covered bonds have sought to diversify their investor bases in recent years as European investors approach their limits in those securities, and new regulations such as Solvency II and Basel III favor issuance of covered bonds over ABS.

Manager Activity: Autos Book Runner Amount (US$ Mil) Rank Mkt.

In a twist on the old cliche about Brazil, it seems at times that covered bonds in Latin America are the instrument of the future, and always will be.

At the 2012 SiLAS conference hosted by Euromoney Seminars and LatinFinance, a panel on rig lease receivable deals sparked hope that the architecture of this sector could be applied to other businesses.