ABS

The one-time giant among U.K. mortgage lenders, Northern Rock, which holds a fifth of all residential mortgages, continues to find itself hobbled. Despite continued assistance from the Bank of England and impending takeover bids, the fate of the bank's Granite master trust is now facing dark predictions.

Fitch Ratings' second annual Emerging Markets conference, held recently in London, started off positively enough. While presenting slide after slide of optimistic news for investors looking for potential opportunities in the sector, the rating agency noted that in 2007 most sovereign ratings of countries with active ABS markets were listed as "positive."

Once exclusively available to the well-to-do, credit has been descending the socio-economic ladder in Mexico and Brazil during the past few years. Easing interest rates and healthy growth, among other factors, are inducting more low-to-middle income borrowers into the credit culture club of Latin America's two bulkiest economies.

Walled in between the widespread perception of contagion in the financial markets and a long list of announcements of writedowns and layoffs, securitization industry professionals found themselves confronting another quiet week of productivity.

Aiming to create what it calls "a single family of global indices," Markit has acquired International Index Co. and agreed to acquire CDS IndexCo, in what will be the biggest and most important acquisition the company has made to date, according to Kevin Gould, executive vice president at Markit.

The coming months will likely bring an unprecedented amount of new litigation concerning asset-backed securities (ABS) and mortgage-backed securities (MBS) issued over the past two years. Disappointed investors are likely to pursue remedies on the strength of a variety of legal theories. Two concepts appear to be the most interesting at this point: (1) deficient disclosure about the trend of deteriorating loan quality and (2) deficient disclosure about the release of excess spread.

In what seems like an endless stream of write-downs on subprime RMBS and ABS CDO holdings, banks have had to revaluate their positions in the structured finance market, which lately means personnel reorganizations. But not all market participants are convinced that an internal restructuring will help solve the banks' problems.

While the subprime bullet has only nicked domestic issuance in Latin American structured finance, and there's plenty of liquidity among local investors to shrug off the crunch abroad, the cross-border front has been struggling to hop back on the rails.

When Citigroup announced on Nov. 4 that it anticipated the fair value of approximately $55 billion in subprime exposures would decline somewhere between $8 billion and $11 billion, the imprecise estimate highlighted a problem faced by participants in the structured debt market. It also underscored the need for a better way of valuing certain asset- and mortgage-backed securities.

The Italian Bersani Decree, which eliminates prepayment penalties on certain mortgages, has set off the highest rate of prepayments since 2000, according to Standard & Poor's. The bump is providing some lift to investors in an otherwise sluggish European ABS sector.

The asset-backed securities market in Europe is still on a roller coaster ride. Last week, Moody's Investors Service announced that it may downgrade a series of SIVs that include some senior sponsors, while Standard & Poor's upgraded 13 tranches in 10 U.K. nonconforming RMBS 2004 and 2005 vintage deals.

Lewtan Technologies, a company that provides data and workflow services to the ABS industry, unveiled its latest analytics tool for the global securitization industry last Friday. The structuring assistant is software for those who wish to run analytical models of just about any type of ABS deals.

Times are changing quickly for the student loan ABS sector, both externally and internally. While the asset class continues to attract attention from investor groups that are shying away from MBS products, lenders and secondary market financing sources are making progress in the way student loans are originated and securitized.

The market material adverse change clause, or "market MAC," gives banks the ability to walk away from their obligation to syndicate or hold debt if further deterioration of the credit markets takes place. Market observers have seen a return of the once-typical clause, but they say it has yet to establish staying power.

Plenty of criticism has already been lobbed at the rating agencies, and panelists at IMN's ABS East conference in Orlando certainly did not spare them any fault.

When compared to the ABS CDO market, the CLO market has remained relatively intact, despite the liquidity dry-up in the corporate credit market this past summer and heightened concern about subprime RMBS contagion. But while new issuance appears to be picking up, an expected increase in corporate defaults could create future complications for these vehicles.

Amid anxieties over what lies ahead, conference delegates got some strongly worded advice last week on how to promote the ABS industrys recovery: bite the bullet, take losses and structure future deals with larger equity components. If the subdued cocktail parties and many underlying bar-side conversations did not underscore the markets shaken confidence, then the remarks delivered during the opening session of IMNs ABS East conference might have.

Several CMBS, student loan ABS and esoteric deals have hit the market since Nov.1, and issuance totaled more than $11 billion. Still, market sources suggest that the asset securitization industry has a long way to go before real recovery begins to take hold.

In recent months, the securitization market had come to rely on the consumer ABS asset classes to sustain production, while the subprime MBS and CDO markets retreated. Last week, however, that small group itself-comprised of credit card, auto and student loan ABS-began to look winded.

As rating agencies boost their CRE-surveillance criteria to defend against opacity, the Commercial Real Estate CDO market appears to be learning from transparency troubles in the ABS CDO space. Recently, Derivative Fitch released a report requesting CRE CDO managers to distribute enhanced and standardized loan-level information to investors in an effort to avoid downgrade shock, while increasing market liquidity.