Securitization

Citigroup has offered to buy the Dryden VI-Leveraged Loan CDO 2004.

New home sales fell 1% in June as demand for newly constructed units remained stuck in a low range during the traditional spring buying season.

Home prices rose 1% in May compared to April, and 16 of 20 metropolitan areas tracked by the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller house price index (HPI) registered monthly price gains.

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley told the state's Register of Deeds Association that she will not sign a multistate settlement with large mortgage servicers that includes a widespread release of liability for claims against the Mortgage Electronic Registry Systems (MERS).Responding to a letter from Massachusetts’s 13 county and eight state-run regional registries, Coakley said her office continues to investigate whether servicers and investors conducted unlawful foreclosures with their reliance on MERS, the system used to track promissory note ownership of the majority of U.S. residential mortgages.

Manhattan Capital Markets (MCM) has hired Bill Berliner as an executive vice president and head of its advisory services unit. Berliner is the Principal of Berliner Consulting & Research.

CDR rates were relatively flat in July, with only one index posting a decrease of 1.2 points, while loss severities rose by an average of 1.5 points across all indices, according to a recent report by Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Turkey’s debut covered bond consists of three tranches pricing between 200 basis points and 250 basis points over Euribor, a spread that will be swapped into a Turkish rate for originator Sekerbank at the time of the closing, said Huib-Jan de Ruijter, director of financial markets at Dutch development bank the FMO, one of the investors in the deal.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) has fined SunTrust Robinson Humphrey and SunTrust Investment Services a total of $5 million for failing to disclose the risks of auction-rate securities when underwriting and selling them.

All sectors of the commercial real estate market showed signs of stabilization or slight improvement in 1Q11, according to Moody’s Investors Service Red-Yellow-Green quarterly property assessment.

Foreclosure doesn't usually mean coming down in the world, economists at the Federal Reserve have found.

Originations of Federal Housing Administration (FHA)-backed loans fell 23% during the first three quarters of fiscal 2011 compared to the same period a year earlier, a further sign of a weakening single-family market.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) has issued an Investor Alert warning investors not to choose risky yet high-reward asset classes over more traditional investments.

Standard & Poor’s found that default rates on U.S. residential mortgage loans continued to fall in June, but the firm is cautious about the remaining threat posed by shadow inventory.

In January all the mortgage industry was aflutter with talk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac —under the tutelage of their regulator — were weighing a change to minimum servicing fees.

At the American Securitization Forum’s (ASF) Sunset Seminar last week, panelists agreed on the potential problems that the proposed regulatory requirement on loan level data disclosure will bring.

Mortgage industry groups are calling for the creation of a strong safe harbor clause that will shield lenders from litigation if they originate loans that comply with ‘Qualified Mortgage’ underwriting standards.

As Washington's banking-policy community was focused on the first anniversary of the Dodd-Frank Act, one important player in the law's passage was noticeably absent.

National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) filed another suit last week against Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) over MBS sold to WesCorp Federal Credit Union, the one-time $34 billion corporate that failed in 2009.

Cohen & Steers, an asset manager specializing in real estate, predicts that U.S. REITs will boost dividends by 10% a year for the next five years.The sunny outlook, which cites a recovery in cash flows, comes in spite of the continued woes of many segments of the U.S. housing markets and the sluggish economic recovery.

Consumer ABS is well-positioned to maintain ratings stability in the wake of a potential double-dip recession, according to a new Fitch Ratings report.