Pre-migration untagged articles

Royal Bank of Scotland is set to buy the entire asset portfolio of Cheyne Finance, the SIV that defaulted last week, and refinance it through a new vehicle, it emerged this week.

Panellists at the Euromoney Spanish Capital Markets Forum in Madrid said on Wednesday that the credit and liquidity crises of this year would not simply widen spreads, but reconfigure the use of securitisation and covered bonds.

Standard and Poor’s downgraded tranches from several US synthetic CDOs this week.

The master Enhancement Conduit (MLEC), the superconduit proposed by a consortium of US banks, is likely to have a two tier capital structure paying more to senior noteholders than junior capital investors, EuroWeek has learned.

Swiss investors were treated to a feast of rare non-financial institution names this week, gorging on Sfr1.5bn of corporate and public sector bond, and in the process, welcoming luxury goods firm Moët Hennessy-Louis Vuitton’s inaugural Swiss franc bond.

The spectre of subprime, recently thought to have been exorcised from the market, haunted credit trading desks on both sides of the Atlantic this week.

After a volatile summer, traders said there are buying opportunities and plenty of buyers. Bob Franz, managing director and co-head of loan sales and trading at Credit Suisse, said that in the last eight weeks the bank had done around $13.5 billion of trades. Rob Milam, managing director, head of par loan and loan credit derivative trading for JPMorgan's North American credit trading business, said trading was up 75% each month over the one before. Both said there were a lot of buyers moving in, with Franz pointing to equity mutual funds and private equity sponsors

The European leveraged loan market is facing many of the same difficulties as the credit market in the U.S., panelists said. Sucheet Gupte, associate director at Standard & Poor's Leveraged Commentary & Data in London, said though August is generally a slow time in London, this year there was no new issuance at all during the month. The pace picked back up with $3.7 billion issued in September, but he said the market is still essentially shut down.

Collateralized loan obligations bought only 20% of the First Data loan paper, Tom Newberry, managing director and head of the syndicated loan group at Credit Suisse, told attendees at the 2007 Loan Syndications and Trading Association conference in New York last Wednesday. That's a number in stark contrast to the 70% CLOs are said to have accounted for the market before the reversal.

A few panelists offered their opinion on the LCDX market going forward. Doug Grossberg, a v.p. at Credit Suisse, suggested there could be sub tranches or even other types of tranches just related to a specific industry, such as auto tranches. In another panel, Rob Alloway, v.p. and head of European credit default swap trading at Lehman Brothers, floated the idea of a high-volatility version, later noting this is something that has not been discussed yet. However, three- or seven-year maturities of the index could be seen in the future.

The Loan Syndications and Trading Association held its 12th annual conference at the Hilton Hotel in New York last Wednesday.

Bank meetings, once merely a routine part of loan syndication, have now become major attractions. The meeting for First Data a few weeks ago drew reporters and TV crews, and at last week's TXU meeting, reporters were apparently waiting outside to track down and speak with attendees about details from the meeting. Watch out, with how popular loans are getting, soon the inner workings and functions could end up on Page 6.