ABS

Deutsche Bank Securities analysts expect President Obama's housing plan to boost prepayments substantially.

BNP Paribas Corporate and Investment Banking appointed Sebastien Cottrell to the firm's U.S. structured credit trading team.

CastleOak Securities hired Gene Gallagher and Roy Jones to its fixed-income sales and trading team.

BlackRock Solutions is looking for a U.K.-based senior portfolio manager who would oversee its sterling and euro businesses.

VTB Capital structured the first rated cash CLO of non-SME corporate loans and bonds with the ultimate risk located in the Russian Federation.

The U.K. government announced further details regarding the implementation of its Asset Protection Scheme.

Freddie Mac's Conventional Mortgage Home Price Index's purchase-only series, which excludes refinancing data, registered the largest annual decrease in its 39-year history during 2008.

Five of the 10 Federal Home Loan Banks that have thus far released unaudited 2008 financial results have taken fourth-quarter net losses and at least four of those have recorded "other than temporary impairments" for the year linked to private-label MBS market deterioration that the FHLBanks Office of Finance's warns could continue.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) approved an interim rule Friday that will institute a one-time special assessment of 20 cents per $100 in domestic deposits on the banking industry in order to quickly restore federal reserves.

Standard & Poor's has put 3,279 ratings of first-lien prime jumbo U.S. RMBS from 2006 and 2007 on CreditWatch Negative, citing an increase in projected losses to 40% from 30%.

Manager Activity: AutosFull Credit to Book (Equal if Joint) U.S. Public ABS Market/144A Market

Over the last several months, Russia and other countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States have engaged in protracted battles to manage the depreciation of their currencies. Some have been more successful than others, but all have fewer resources to keep the fight going than they did only late last year.

The reinsurance industry got some surprisingly good news last month with a new CAT bond deal pricing. There was also the announcement of a new European product promising to increase transparency and boost capital market transactions in the near term.

Little has been done by way of loan modifications in the troubled U.K. RMBS sector.

The outlook for the securitization market in 2009 is bleak. Problems related to ABS are manifold and a recovery of the securitization market is not yet in sight. On the one hand, the future prospects of the securitization business highly depend on a stabilization of the financial industry overall. On the other hand, the credit cycle downturn will clearly test the solidity of European structured finance notes. Uncertainties related to ABS are high. An apparent example for the current market dislocation is the CLO sector - European leveraged loan CLOs are on the radar screens as undercollateralization is imminent.

Conditions in the U.S. mortgage backed securities market have improved, but the market still has a ways to go before it regains its pre-financial crisis vigor.

After several years of putting most of the multifamily mortgages they bought in their portfolios, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are preparing to rev up securitization of such loans.

At the American Securitization Forum's (ASF) conference last month held in Las Vegas, a survey presented in one of the panels showed that recovery for the U.S. securitization market won't happen until 2011.

With the worsening economic outlook, structured finance market participants have learned that it is necessary to read the fine print when it comes to managing their portfolios.

President Obama recently unveiled an initiative designed to support the housing market and reduce the catastrophic number of foreclosures. While the GSE-centric plan generally represents an incremental change from earlier programs, its controversial inclusion of a proposal for bankruptcy cram-downs may ultimately aid large numbers of homeowners by increasing the number of loans that ultimately are modified.