Emerging markets

Eversheds has appointed structured finance and derivatives lawyer Kingsley Ong as partner in its Hong Kong banking and finance team.

Though the Basel II process to write new international capital standards lingered for nearly a decade, its successor has come a remarkably long way in just the past year.

Recent attacks on securitization have centered on its legal soundness.

Latin America's two largest markets - Brazil and Mexico - will present ABS players with different sets of risks and opportunities next year.

Russia, Turkey and neighboring emerging markets saw only scattered ABS issuance last year, and that largely depended on support from government-linked institutions, development banks or regular bank funding. Bond investors were mostly absent.

Spanish bank Grupo Santander has agreed to purchase a $2 billion Mexican mortgage portfolio from General Electric Co.'s finance division for $162 million plus the assumption of debt, according to Dow Jones.

Turkey’s Garanti Bank has closed a club deal backed by diversified payment rights (DPRs) to the tune of €250 million, according to a source close to the transaction. The paper is rated ‘A-’ by Fitch Ratings, the first time the agency has assessed DPR bonds from Garanti. In general, Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s were far more active on the Turkish DPR front during the issuance boom of a few years ago, due to the fact that deals were overwhelmingly wrapped by monoline insurers.

RBS Securities, the investment banking and brokerage unit of Royal Bank of Scotland, is looking to add trading and sales professionals and strategists specializing in Latin American markets, according to senior fixed-income officials.

New capital requirements under the Basel III framework would have cost banks roughly $770 billion had they been fully implemented at the end of last year, according to a 32-page study released Thursday by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision.

Even with much of the developed world still struggling, Brazil's economy exudes health. But robust growth over the medium to long term is very much conditioned on advances in infrastructure, where enduring bottlenecks are bound to tighten unless investment grows and private-sector investors play a larger role.

ABS market players have certainly learned their lesson from the problems that led to the financial crisis.

Standard Chartered Bank has completed its sixth CLO under its START CLO program called START VI CLO, according to a release from the firm.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a temporary order yesterday allowing foreign ABS issuers to sell ABS to foreign investors without complying with the SEC’s new rule 17g-5.

Credit Agricole appointed Gordon Kingsley as head of Latin America debt and credit markets (DCM) - origination.

Last Friday, CNH Capital America filed an S-3 with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to issue a potential six-tranche securitization backed by agricultural or construction equipment loans under its program called CNH Equipment Trust.

Specialized asset management firm Dock Street Capital Management (DSCM) has opened an office in Hong Kong.

Microfinance securitizations tend to be closely tied to the ratings of the originator/servicer, said Fitch Ratings Director Deep N. Mukherjee in a recent report. “In the absence of suitable mitigants with respect to such counterparties, Fitch will link the rating of the transactions to the rating of the originator/servicer,” Mukherjee said.

Dismal home sales figures to be released by Mexican research company Softec are sure to hit construction-loan securitizations, according a report by Moody’s Investors Service. The firm will project a 12% drop for 2010 in a report due to be released over the next few weeks.

Despite waning demand for U.S. municipal bond insurance, a startup company believes there is value in credit enhancement among the world’s developing markets.

Worker remittances to developing countries are projected to total $325 billion for 2010, up 5.9% from $307 billion last year, according to the World Bank’s Migration and Remittances Factbook 2011. The flows to developing countries are expected to continue growing in 2011 and 2012, potentially topping $370 billion within two years.