The Securities and Exchange Commission has provided more details about a pilot project to test the revised requirements for shelf registrations that are part of Regulation AB II. ABS issuers must comply with the new rules and forms, other than asset-level disclosures, no later than Nov. 23, 2015. The SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance recently invited ABS issuers to request staff review of their registration statements in draft form, prior to filing. “We will select...

Issuers of securities backed by assets other than residential mortgages were able to win some concessions from federal regulators in the final risk-retention rule that was approved this week. However, the standards for “qualified” loans that are exempt from risk-retention requirements are much more stringent than those for qualified-residential mortgages, even including downpayment requirements in some instances. The risk-retention requirements for non-mortgage ABS and commercial MBS take effect two years after the final rule is published in the Federal Register. Securities that include loans that don’t qualify for exemptions will be required to have risk-retention of at least 5.0 percent, though there are instances when the required retention can be lower. The final standards qualifying commercial loans, commercial real-estate loans and auto loans were...

New issuance of non-mortgage ABS faltered again in the third quarter of 2014, slipping 5.4 percent from the second quarter, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS ranking and analysis. Issuers produced $46.48 billion of new ABS during the third quarter. While that marked the second straight quarterly decline after the robust $53.44 billion issued in early 2014, current issuance levels remained relatively high for the post-crisis period. Through the first nine months of 2014, new ABS issuance totaled...[Includes three data charts]

Subprime loans are accounting for a larger share of auto ABS issuance and losses on auto ABS are increasing. However, rating services suggest that the trends aren’t too worrisome, with ratings performance on track to record one of the best years ever. Some $66.9 billion in auto ABS were issued this year through September, up 26.8 percent from the same period in 2013. Subprime deals accounted for 25.8 percent of auto ABS issued this year, and volume ($17.0 billion) was down slightly from a year ago. But subprime auto loans also show up...

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was critical this week of aspects of the student loan securitization process as well as servicer performance as it issued its latest annual report on private student-loan borrowing. The report analyzed more than 5,300 private student loan complaints between Oct. 1, 2013, and Sept. 30, 2014, an increase of 38 percent over the previous year. “Lending practices in the private student-loan market in the years preceding the financial crisis shared...

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s release of a final rule setting loan-level disclosure requirements for certain structured finance products has only slightly reduced the uncertainty regarding the impact of the so-called Reg AB2 requirements. Among other issues, the SEC left parts of its initial proposal from 2010 unfinished, with no indication of if or when further action will be taken. For example, the SEC had originally proposed extending loan-level disclosure requirements to the 144A private-placement market in addition to requiring such disclosures for certain SEC-registered securities, including residential MBS, commercial MBS, ABS backed by auto loans and re-securitizations of such collateral. At the recent ABS East conference produced by Information Management Network in Miami Beach, Rolaine Bancroft, a senior special counsel at the SEC, said...

The disclosure rule recently issued by the Securities and Exchange Commission aims to reduce reliance on credit ratings in the structured finance market, an issue that federal regulators have long grappled with. The SEC’s Regulation AB took effect in 2006, and it included a requirement that publicly offered securities have an investment-grade rating. The so-called Reg AB2 finalized by the SEC in August eliminates the rating requirement and instead sets a number of new requirements for publicly issued deals. Beginning in November 2015, the CEO of the depositor of publicly issued...

The agency single-family MBS market posted its best quarter in a year as total issuance climbed to $267.33 billion during the third quarter of 2014, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis and ranking. The combined MBS issuance of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae rose 6.6 percent from the second quarter of 2014, hitting its strongest level since the third quarter of last year. On a year-to-date basis, agency MBS remained 48.7 percent below the pace set in the first nine months of 2013. Even the long-suffering non-agency MBS market showed...[Includes two data charts]

“Rating shopping is alive and well,” Calvin Wong, chief credit officer at Morningstar Credit Ratings, said last week at the ABS East conference in Miami Beach. The Securities and Exchange Commission recently released a rule setting new requirements for the rating services, but Wong warned that the SEC hasn’t done enough to address the issue. He said...

Investors are comfortable with broad swaths of the structured finance market and issuers are cautiously optimistic that regulators won’t hinder activity too much going forward, according to attendees at the ABS East conference produced by Information Management Network this week in Miami Beach. “We’re in a pretty good spot right now in the market from a supply-demand perspective,” said Bob Behal, a principal and co-head of ABS investments and commercial MBS investments at Vanguard Group. Almost 3,700 people had registered by the start of the conference, up slightly from around 3,500 people in 2013. Will Zak, a director at Barclays, said...