Investor appetite for insurance risk continues to outstrip demand, prompting an increase in catastrophe bonds among other insurance-linked securities, according to industry analysts. Late last week, Fitch Ratings assigned a BB rating to a $200 million catastrophe bond that will provide re-insurance protection to Hannover Ruck for exposure to earthquakes in California. The deal will push U.S.-related issuance of catastrophe bonds to $3.86 billion in 2015, according to Artemis, a firm that tracks issuance of the bonds. A record volume of catastrophe bonds was issued...
After just over a year of buying mortgages that don’t meet the qualified-mortgage test, Jeff Lemieux has departed Bayview Asset Management while signaling that a non-QM securitization likely won’t happen any time soon – or even this year. Lemieux, who headed correspondent purchases for Bayview, provided Inside MBS & ABS with a blunt assessment of both non-QM originations and securitizations: “Nothing’s happening.” Lemieux went...
The single-family rental securitization business is fueling investor purchases of homes and causing problems for communities, according to a new survey and report by consumer advocates. The California Reinvestment Coalition called for a number of reforms for the single-family rental industry. “This conduct has had a measurable, negative impact on communities,” the CRC said. “It has transferred wealth from homeowners to Wall Street denizens and is transforming America from a homeownership society to a renter-ship society.” The CRC based...
Proposed credit card ABS disclosure requirements from the Securities and Exchange Commission could compromise commercially sensitive proprietary issuer information and prove too burdensome for issuers, according to the Structured Finance Industry Group. The industry group this week unveiled an alternative card ABS format that was endorsed by both its issuer and investor members. The three-part disclosure “would provide more information on more metrics” than either of two options proposed by the SEC. Last year, the SEC adopted...
Neither of the credit-rating industry’s perennial market leaders – Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s Investors Service – managed to claim a top spot during the first quarter of 2015, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS ranking. Fitch Ratings ranked as the top player in rating the bigger non-mortgage ABS market. The company rated 43 ABS issued during the first quarter that represented 64.2 percent of total issuance by dollar amount. The company rated all eight credit-card ABS issued in early 2015, along with most of the student-loan deals. Fitch raised...[Includes two data tables]
The sale of RoundPoint Mortgage Servicing has fallen apart with the bidder walking away from the table, according to industry advisors close to the transaction. Sources indicate that Tavistock Group, the owner of the nation’s 24th largest servicer, still has an interest in finding a buyer for the servicer/lender, but for now no deal is imminent. Tavistock bills itself as an international private-equity firm with a strong interest in finance, real estate and other sectors. The firm is headquartered in the Bahamas. An advisor close to the transaction declined...
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau boosted Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac business by some $132.9 billion when it gave the two government-sponsored enterprises a free pass on the debt-to-income ratio requirements of the qualified-mortgage rule. For the non-agency world, a qualified mortgage has to have a DTI ratio of 43 percent or less. While the government-insured market has its own QM rules that effectively ignore DTI, a loan eligible for sale to the GSEs is considered a qualified mortgage if it meets all the QM criteria – such as no interest-only payments – other than the DTI cap. From the beginning of 2014 through the end of the first quarter of this year, about 16.3 percent of the loans securitized by Fannie and Freddie had...[Includes two data tables]
From the beginning of 2014 through the end of 1Q15, roughly 16 percent of the loans securitized by Fannie and Freddie had DTI ratios exceeding 43 percent...
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