Securitisation Regulation

Read time: 2 minutes 45 seconds

Thus far CMBS has had a storming year and all current indicators point towards 2018 being a bumper year for the product.  After two years of relative malaise on the primary issuance front, the first half of 2018 has proven to be anything but sluggish.  Notable transactions that have so far taken place include Citibank and Morgan Stanley ‎closing an extremely well priced transaction secured by Finnish assets (a CMBS 2.0 first), Bank of America Merrill Lynch achieving some hugely impressive pricing on an Italian CMBS and most recently the spotlight has turned to Goldman Sachs who have recently obtained excellent pricing on a £427m CMBS secured by a portfolio of UK hotels.  The market though has not simply been confined to conduit deals as demonstrated by the fact that Blackstone successfully closed CMBS Pietra Nera Uno (which is apparently the first of a swathe of Agency CMBS deals that Blackstone are expected to bring to the market) and the recent market rumours that Natwest are currently in the midst of structuring a synthetic CMBS.  Taken together all these transactions provide the firmest indicator yet that that the beleaguered CMBS product is firmly back in vogue.
Continue Reading The European CMBS market is positively booming!

Read time: 2 minutes 15 seconds

Rather like the Hans Christian Anderson story about the little match girl, the news that BAML has successfully launched two CMBS deals in quick succession has flickered light into an otherwise cold and beleaguered primary issuance market.  Not only do these transactions provide a clear indicator that there is still life in the market, but this news is the most positive development for the industry since the summer of 2015, when adverse macro-economic factors precipitated by concerns over Grexit and the Chinese financial crisis shut down primary CMBS issuance.
Continue Reading CMBS – the little match girl of European ABS

This summer, fans of the non-performing loan (NPL) circus, are in for a treat with the launch of the Italian tightrope trick.

Spurred on by the recent European Banking Authority stress tests, the news last week that Banca Popolare di Bari will become the first bank to utilise the Italian state guarantee scheme and deploy

Fuelled by continued macro-economic uncertainty, the European CMBS market is currently experiencing a prolonged period of malaise. Meanwhile the Italian legislative cogs have continued to turn. The news last week that the Italian government has finally approved a decree on NPL securitisations, which comes hot off the heels of the proposals to establish a private

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision announced yesterday that it had finalised the rules for the Liquidity Coverage Ratio or LCR i.e. the main mechanic for regulating liquidity in the Basel III package of reforms.

The LCR requires that a bank hold a sufficient stock of “High Quality Liquid Assets” to meet its net cash outflows in a hypothetical stress scenario. The rules set out the parameters for the stress scenario, the calculation of the net cash outflow and the type of assets which can constitute High Quality Liquid Assets.

Lobbying has achieved a notable success as certain “residential mortgage-backed securities rated AA or higher” can now be included in a bank’s stock of high quality liquid assets (subject to a 25% haircut, which is lower than the haircut applied to some corporate debt securities and to the limitation that this component can form no more than 15% of the buffer as a whole).
Continue Reading RMBS can form part of the Basel III liquidity buffer. Some good news for the structured finance industry.