CDOs

Lloyds Bank TSB is marketing bonds backed by ₤1.2 billion ($1.92 billion) of loans to small and medium sized businesses.

Friday's European bank stress tests revealed that all securitization positions in European banking and trading books were stressed, according to market reports.

Global issuance of CLOs is at $5.0 billion via 13 deals for the year to date through July 15, according to Dealogic.

Mutual funds that invest in leveraged loans may be pulling in less new money, but banks themselves have been picking up the slack in lending, putting them in competition with institutional investors and contributing to the general froth in the market.

Consolidation among CLO managers, underway since the financial crisis, shows no signs of slowing even as issuance of these structured investment vehicles starts to recover.

MBIA Insurance Corp. voluntarily dismissed with prejudice its case against Bank of America Merrill Lynch, prompting analysts to speculate that a settlement could be reached soon.

BlueMountain Capital Management LLC is in the market with a $361 million collateralized loan obligation.

RBC Capital Markets has added a cohead of U.S. loan capital markets, the firm said.

GreensLedge Capital Markets has appointed Ken Wormser and David Powar as managing partners at the firm. Wil Fischer, Ninat Lekagul, and Aimee Means will also join the firm as managing directors, with Mark David, Naz Majidi, and Craig Reckin being named directors at GreensLedge.

Apollo Global Management and its subsidiaries bought Gulf Stream Asset Management, which now manages 10 CLOs and has over $3 billion in assets under management.

Babson Capital Management is in the market with a $512 million CLO.

Eleven years ago, AXA Investment Managers (IM) was one of the first firms to launch a European CLO, and through the most recent financial crisis, when so many new entrants to the European CLO space found it impossible to stay in business, its products were among the few survivors.

Ambac Financial Group, the bankrupt holding company for bond insurer Ambac Assurance Corp., filed a plan of reorganization in bankruptcy court this week, but quickly came under criticism from the Wisconsin regulator in charge of overseeing Ambac Assurance.

Moody’s Investors Service downgraded Portugal by four notches to 'Ba2' from 'Baa1' with a negative outlook yesterday.

ABN AMRO appointed Patrick Keleher managing director and head of loan syndication in North America, a new role at the Dutch firm.

With the Dodd-Frank Act and Basel capital regime already imposing new requirements on derivatives players, the U.S. bank regulators added another one Tuesday completely of their own accord.

The loan default rate remained at a historic low in June, according to a report issued today by Standard & Poor’s Leveraged Commentary and Data.

GSO Capital Partners, a credit investment arm of Blackstone Group, is in the market with a $633 million CLO.

Until the financial crisis brought CLO issuance to a virtual halt, CLOs were among the largest and fastest growing structured products in the marketplace, representing approximately 60% of institutional participation in syndicated loans in 2006. While the long-term impact of the Dodd-Frankrisk retention rules on CLOs remains uncertain, the short-term outlook for new CLO issuance is promising. As spreads on the triple-A rated tranches of CLOs have continued to tighten, the arbitrage on CLO collateral has become increasingly attractive in recent months. For the first time since the onset of the financial crisis, CLOs are showing signs of a sustained revival.

The U.S. Congress and U.S. regulatory agencies have imposed or proposed broad-based and aggressive laws and rulemaking in response to the failure of securitizations directly or indirectly backed by U.S. subprime residential mortgage loans originated in the several years prior to the onset of the financial crisis in 2007. Notwithstanding this aggressive response, there is no empirical evidence that transactions backed by other types of assets, including asset-backed securities (ABS) of foreign issuers, have been prone to such failures or merit coverage in the same regulatory scheme as applies to securitizations backed by subprime residential mortgage loans.