ABS

House prices fell by only 0.6% from March to April, according to the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller 20-city house price index, signaling that home values may be stabilizing.

Discover Bank is in the market with a $1 billion Term ABS Loan Facility (TALF)-eligible credit card deal. Barclays Capital and Deutsche Bank Securities are leading the transaction.

Ford Credit Canada completed securitizing nearly $600 million of auto loans in the company’s first public retail securitization, the firm announced today.

Cantor Fitzgerald has expanded its leveraged finance group in London and could have as many as 10 leveraged finance professionals there by the end of the year, according to Martin Teevan, Cantor's senior managing director of high yield and distressed trading.

Fitch Ratings has hired Melissa Tessier as a senior director for structured credit business development. The firm also promoted Jeremy Carter to head of European and Asian structured credit.

Direct Capital has formed a new division focused on providing financing programs for vendors in the printing equipment industry.

Opus Capital Markets Consultants (Opus CMC) and Mortgage Data Management Company (MDMC) announced the acquisition of the due diligence division of MDMC by Opus CMC today, according to an Opus CMC release.

Fitch Ratings said that the servicing strategies of U.K. nonconforming lenders have developed rapidly since the onset of the recession, adding that these practices continue to evolve to reflect the changing economic environment.

Last Friday, Standard & Poor’s released its final report containing tweaked methodology for rating U.S. conduit or conduit/fusion CMBS transactions from that originally proposed.

Bank of America is coming to market with a $2.5 billion auto deal managed by Banc of America Securities.

There is a disconnect between how the market prices residential mortgage-backed securities and their intrinsic value, according to a recent study by Fitch Solutions to gauge the factors driving the valuations of RMBS tranches.

Markit, a financial information services company, will release a family of sovereign credit default swap (CDS) indices that will track investor perceptions of the credit risk of a range of countries around the world.

The default rate on prime loans backing private-label securities jumped 214 basis points from April to 8.8% in May, according a report by Five Bridges Advisors.

Standard & Poor's has placed more than 1,000 U.S. conduit and fusion commercial mortgage-backed securities deals on "watch negative."

Though Barack Obama pointed to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 during his presidential campaign as a source of the financial crisis, his administration's proposal for regulatory reform would expand a key part of the law that gave the Federal Reserve Board "umbrella supervisory" powers.

The federal bank and thrift agencies Friday clarified the capital treatment of mortgage loans modified under the administration's plan to reduce foreclosures.

Standard & Poor's published refined methodologies and assumptions it uses to rate U.S. conduit or conduit/fusion CMBS transactions.

The U.K.'s Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) released some updated forecasts on the U.K. economy for 2009.

UBS has greatly mitigated its exposure to problem mortgage assets through an arrangement with the Swiss National Bank and said its second quarter will look better than its first, but it still is anticipating a loss for the period.

Two Congressmen have introduced legislation that would place an 18-month moratorium on the Home Mortgage Valuation Code of Conduct (HVCC), a Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac edict that — among other things — bans loan brokers and loan officers from directly ordering appraisals.