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Most of the time, it’s much easier to deal with new leverage than getting rid of old leverage. That’s something the US CLO market would do well to remember with lead managers said to be placing new CLOs with hedge funds that are taking down senior tranches, provided they can do so, up to 9x levered, making the 150bp spreads on offer look a bit more exciting.
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The CLO market is ready for more supply and ripe for innovation, but that optimism is tempered by threats of a liquidity crunch in non-Volcker-compliant triple-A paper. The market is hoping for a deal on legacy CLOs to stop a trading freeze, but if that doesn't happen, it needs to wake up to two uncomfortable truths.
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The CLO market is ready for more supply and ripe for innovation, but that optimism is tempered by threats of a liquidity crunch in non-Volcker-compliant triple-A paper. The market is hoping for a deal on legacy CLOs to stop a trading freeze, but if that doesn't happen, it needs to wake up to two uncomfortable truths.
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Originate to distribute, the business model oft quoted as one of the primary causes of the subprime mortgage crisis in the US, and by extension, the rest of the financial crisis, is back. But this time it’s different, apparently, or at least backwards.
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Capital requirements ought to be the soft padding that lets the market bounce around without doing any damage. But when they are too high, capital requirements, rather than economics, set the price of a security.
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The risk weights for securitization have been halved, again, in the latest version of Solvency II. Naturally the market is pleased to be further out of the regulatory dog house, but the way risk weights (and therefore careers, businesses and economies) can be slashed at the stroke of a pen ought to give pause for thought.
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The launch of the first green bond index is a coup for Solactive and the Climate Bonds Initiative, though neither of them has put an enormous amount of work into it.
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The Bank of England’s Funding for Lending Scheme (FLS) has finally caught on. The last quarter saw almost as much borrowing as the entire year previously, suggesting that the banks were right all along — the reason they weren’t lending was because nobody wanted to borrow.
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When Mario Draghi said — for the second time— that the ECB would consider buying ABS to boost Europe’s economic prospects, everyone took note. Everyone, it seems, except Europe’s regulators, who have shown a reluctance to change their anti-securitization tack. It is time for them to swallow some pride and roll back the harshest securitization regulation — before it is too late.