ABS

Marine cargo container lessors are likely to cut back in spending if the global economy slows more than expected, according to Standard & Poor's analysts.

Swiss Reinsurance Co. is in the market with its Series 2011-3 deal under its principal-at-risk, variable-note program Successor X Ltd.

Guy Carpenter & Co. appointed Desmond Potter as managing director and head of GC Securities M&A Advisory – Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

Reinstating trust in the ratings process is key to growing investor interest, according to buyside participants in a Tuesday panel at the ABS East conference hosted by Information Management Network.

At the ABS East conference, organized by the Information Management Network, the message of ending the market’s over-reliance on ratings rang loud and clear.

There is a scarcity of investors at this year’s ABS East conference hosted by Information Management Network.

When it comes to bond pricing, one message that rang out clear at Information Management Network’s ABS East Conference on Sunday: investors need to do their own homework and make sure they know what’s behind the valuation tools they employ.

The Standard & Poor’s downgrades of leading Spanish banks earlier this week could reverberate on outstanding ABS deals, the agency said.

Auto ABS continues to lead consumer ABS volumes and the latest deal to emerge in the pipeline comes via Honda's $1.0 billion Honda Auto Receivables 2011-3 Owner Trust.

German-based Styrolution Group has closed a €500 million ($667 million) trade receivables program, according to a release from Finacity Corp., which helped structured the deal and serves as the administrator.

Spain’s pharmaceutical lobby is negotiating a plan to sell state-guaranteed securities backed by €5.4 billion ($7.1 billion) of unpaid bills, according to a Bloomberg report.

A new SME guarantee scheme announced by the U.K. government could be positive for SME ABS issuance and would align the U.K. with its European peers.

Esoteric or nontraditional assets are gaining momentum to claim a bigger piece of the ABS market.

U.S. structured finance players are exploring new frontiers. With ABS issuance volume not as robust as it once was, yield-hungry investors have turned to esoteric assets.

The Dodd-Frank Act's call for the creation a self-regulatory organization (SRO) or other entity to assign new ratings was mostly panned by structured-finance industry participants, but relying on existing Rule 17g-5 - the industry's preferred alternative - may have a fatal flaw.

INTRODUCTION

According to figures as of Sept. 29 from the ASR Scorecards database, $55.96 billion in public ABS was issued year-to-date in 2011.

The adage "Where there's smoke there's usually fire" probably explains the concerns about regulators' queries into whether REITs still warrant an exclusion permitting them to use significant leverage in their business models. The issue is especially relevant since REITs are primary buyers of agency RMBS and many view them as the likeliest buyers of private-label RMBS when that market's health returns .

Not too long ago, Turkey's Sekerbank was a name with no resonance in the structured finance world. Then, in mid-summer, the bank issued a covered bond deal that broke two barriers. It was the first of its kind from Turkey and the first covered bond globally to be backed by SME loans. Some covered bond purists even questioned whether SME collateral disqualified an instrument from being called a covered bond, which are overwhelmingly secured by mortgage pools. Turkish law has two separate regulations, one for covered bonds backed by mortgages and another for those secured by any of a wide range of other assets.

Three to four years removed from the time non-Agency RMBS and housing markets began to collapse, this article provides a historical performance update of the subprime loan sector for vintage years 1997 through 2008. Performance of the 2005, 2006, and 2007 vintages is far and away worse than for any other year, even prior to 2000 when subprime lending was still fairly new. In addition, the extent of negative equity in the borrower repayment pipeline for never-modified and at-least-once-modified subprime loans for the 2005, 2006 and 2007 vintages is measured. Given the extreme and broad corrections in residential property prices since approximately mid-2006, the mortgage repayment struggles of borrowers, and the intended effects of loan-modifications, negative equity density has been pushed to the performing and early-stage delinquency end of the pipeline. That is, modifications have resulted in a larger share of performing (active and current) borrowers with significantly more negative equity than otherwise would be the case had a loan modification not occurred.