Lehman

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The phrase “Lehman fallout” has become almost white noise in the financial world.  Everything and anything has been attributed to the demise of the onetime banking giant.  At the risk of sounding cliché, everything has indeed changed because of the collapse of Lehman.  Apart from the obvious, the failure of Lehman has opened the floodgates to all kinds of scrutiny and the banks have quite understandably reacted to this new regime of regulation and compliance.
Continue Reading Wherefore art thou, LIBOR?

I suspect I may have been alone amongst viewers of the recent Singapore Grand Prix in that, rather than marvelling at the brilliance of Sebastian Vettel’s driving skills, my thoughts instead were on the world’s largest bankruptcy – Lehman Brothers. For those who have not been living and breathing the consequences of the financial sector’s greatest ever failure, the link between the cars and glamour of F1 and an insolvent investment bank may not be immediately obvious. However if you were to know that Lehman Brothers is still the second largest shareholder in the sport, with a 15.3 per cent stake in Formula One’s holding company, then the connection becomes clearer. Given the fourth anniversary of the bank’s demise was a few days ago, it is also a good time to think about how far we’ve come since the dark days of Autumn 2008, a time when many thought the world as we knew it was coming to an end. So, four years on, what have we learnt?
Continue Reading Lehman Car Crash

Just a few blissful years ago, one would never think of originators getting wound up or sellers being liquidated. In the world of structured finance, the possibilities of that doomsday scenario were remote, unthinkable and above all, no one wanted to discuss its potential occurrence.

That changed with the Lehman collapse and with that, a domino effect ensued.

Of course, that’s not to say that the industry never thought of what would happen in that unlikely occurrence and the transaction documents do provide for some sort of crisis resolution. Despite the existence of clauses to deal with bankrupt originators, these would prove to be tedious and impractical at best and totally unworkable at worst.
Continue Reading Practical implications of insolvent originators