ABS

The Municipal Infrastructure and Assurance Corp. came one step closer to insuring municipal bonds by gaining approval from the New York Insurance Department to act as a financial guarantor.

Jefferies Group announced the hiring of three senior managing directors in its fixed-income sales and trading platform.

Few investment banks know the trust-preferred securities market as well as FTN Midwest Securities Corp. Since 2001, the First Horizon National Corp. unit has structured more than 30 pooled trust-preferred deals, raising $22 billion for hundreds of banks and thrifts.

Liffe, the international derivatives business of Euronext, said that the Exchange will soon launch a credit default swap offering on Bclear in 4Q08. The CDS will combine the security of an exchange and clearing house with the flexibility enjoyed in the OTC market.

DebtX and boutique investment banking firm KEMA have signed a multi-year agreement with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to sell commercial real estate loans via www.debtx.com.

Deutsche Bank’s global institutional asset management business, DB Advisors, appointed Kyle Delaney as head of the division in the Americas.

Despite all the troubles that the structured finance sector is experiencing, it is still worth saving, said Richard Field, managing director at TYI, LLC, in a presentation at Information Managment Network's ABS East conference that started Sunday.

Lowenstein Sandler created a global financial crisis group, a team of attorneys from a broad scope of practice areas dedicated to serving a growing list of clients affected by the current economic turmoil.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) is set to announce 2009 conforming loan limits for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by Nov. 7. The limits define the maximum loan size of mortgages that can be purchased by the Enterprises.

Federal Housing Administration lender and Ginnie Mae issuer Lend America, Melville, N.Y., said it is finalizing a "structured transaction" designed to help "a major global financial institution" refinance a roughly $1 billion pool of sub-performing loans into mortgages with more affordable terms.

To counter rising mortgage rates, the National Association of Realtors is urging the Treasury Department to "aggressively" increase its purchase of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac MBS.

Alternative energy has permanently entered mainstream discourse and there is little disagreement that the United States needs to reduce its dependence on foreign oil and develop clean, dependable energy sources.

Regulators said they envisage new specific treatment for resecuritizations, and expect an interim treatment until banks are fully integrated to the new Basel accord.

Over the past few weeks, Brazil has experienced its own version of the flight-to-quality that's torn through the U.S. and Western European money markets. Small and medium banks are seeing depositors defect to larger competitors, while funding sources have evaporated.

The U.K. government's move to backstop bank debt liabilities is expected to have a positive spillover effect on ABS pricing.

In these challenging times for domestic securitization in both the U.S. and Canada, two recent developments will serve to ease the burden of cross-border ABS transactions. A number of these transactions have occurred and more are in the works.

Let us acknowledge the end of securitization as we have known it. As what began as a "subprime" problem metastasized into, first, a credit market collapse and, ultimately, a worldwide economic crisis, those of us who lived and worked and profited from securitization should do some deep soul-searching. What we now see, with the benefit of hindsight, is not just a series of bad judgments and unintended consequences but instead a wholesale systemic failure of gargantuan proportions. The original securitization paradigm became so corrupted over time by those participating in the MBS/CDO sector that it is pointless to debate whether good technology got into the wrong hands or the technology was itself flawed. It is impossible to distinguish "the dancer from the dance," and the market is, without mercy, sweeping both away.

For collateral managers who focus on CDOs, the most recent stream of troubling news in the financial sector has further shaken up an industry already reeling from more than a year's worth of nega-

The third quarter of 2008 brought a dramatic reorganization of the global banking system and a virtual shutdown in the credit markets. Financial guarantors, which have been battling downgrades for months now, have seen new structured finance opportunities seize up.

Fannie Mae announced two weeks ago that it would cancel the planned increase in its adverse market delivery fee. The hike would have taken effect Nov. 1.