When Freddie Mercury and Monserrat Caballe first released their homage to the city that hosts IMN and Afme’s conference each year, Global ABS did not exist. Nor, to all intents and purposes, did the European ABS industry.
In 1987, Rob Ford was one year into his career. Some 36 years on, and Ford has been one of the key players in turning securitization into the powerful financing tool that it is today — as well as teaching more than one GlobalCapital journalist a thing or two about the industry they’re attempting to cover.
So the news that Ford and Gary Kirk are retiring from their roles as founding partners at TwentyFour Asset Management spread fast around the corridors of Barcelona’s CCIB convention centre on Wednesday.
Ford will remain in an advisory role at TwentyFour, and few can match his passion for extolling the benefits of securitization, so he is hardly going to suddenly become a stranger. But it’s a good excuse to think about whether, looking ahead, ABS practitioners can depart from Barcelona with their gaze fixed on a beautiful horizon, as Freddie promised us.
There’s certainly a sense that the market has worked out how to get deals done in a tougher environment, and an optimism that wasn’t there this time last year. Tom Lemmon’s feature from our special report (make sure you pick up a print copy if you’ve not already) looks at how several RMBS issuers are forging new paths to establish themselves in what remains a pretty tricky environment.
On the other hand, certain investors have told GlobalCapital that they’re finally starting to get concerned about asset performance. More on that in GlobalCapital in the coming days.
Of course, some of these investors were the same people stuck waiting half an hour (probably longer than it would have taken to walk) for a taxi to their evening entertainment, so maybe that had tainted their outlook. If they’d treated the trip as a Bicycle Race, perhaps they’d have made it in time for the churros (particularly excellent at JP Morgan's knees-up, we hear).
Before that, private credit CLOs were capturing the imagination on one panel, as reported by our new CLO correspondent Victoria Thiele, and Jonathan Hill used his keynote speech to declare he had “unfinished business” when it came to tackling the regulatory burden on securitization.
As ever, today’s newsletter includes KBRA’s summary of the day’s panels, so be sure to check them out here.
Enjoy the rest of the conference, and a safe return to all.