The complex financing arrangements used by certain investors and a lack of clarity from federal regulators can make it difficult to determine the entity responsible for meeting risk-retention requirements in some MBS and ABS, according to Charles Sweet, senior counsel at the law firm of Morgan Lewis. The Dodd-Frank Act generally required the sponsor of a security to retain at least 5.0 percent of the risk from the security. Sweet said determining the sponsor of an MBS or ABS can be fairly straightforward when one company originates the assets, services the receivables and initiates securitization, as in the case of an ABS backed by automobile retail contracts from a captive finance company of a car manufacturer. However, where securitization roles are more dispersed, Sweet said...
Five years have passed since the Federal Housing Finance Agency filed suit against 18 Wall Street firms and banks for peddling nonprime MBS to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the years leading up to the housing crisis. All of the defendants have settled or lost with one glaring exception: Royal Bank of Scotland. As for when (and if) RBS will settle, that’s a different and complicated matter. The bank is presently owned by the British government, which took control of it during the financial crisis. In other words, any settlement might entail taxpayer money and cause a political controversy in the U.K. And the bill could be...
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