Comings and Goings

AAA spreads still tightening while credit inching wider.

A new article is out about CMBS refinancing activity and maturity schedules. Although I generally agree that there are CMBS loans coming due this year, and the largest are the most likely to have a chance of refinancing, I disagree that it will be as hard as some think (recent experience tells me loans aren't that hard to come by even on smaller properties with a little hair on them). Also, I refer the author to the real big maturity wave coming to us from bank balance sheets:



Bank of America closed a deal to buy back $3 billion in resi paper from Fannie/Freddie on the last day of 2010. Does anyone know the real story here, not the WSJ version? Are a bunch of POs about to pay off early? Were these on the balance sheets of the Enterprises? Are they all in default, or does it include performing loans that might not have been underwritten to conforming standards?

Worldwide investors apparently ranked the US as the #1 spot to put there CRE dollars to work.

UK minister comments that too much regulation could 'snuff out innovation'. Reminds me of 2002 in Georgia when representatives passed new "predatory lending" laws on October 1st, and on October 2nd half the states lenders shuttered their operations leading to a dearth of available credit to homeowners (the laws effectively allowed a borrower to sue up to the investor level in an RMBS deal that had a loan in it that was in violation - in other words, your pension fund was on the hook for reps and warranties made by an illicit broker). Whether that was a good or a bad thing may be up for debate, but the law was quickly repealed and subprime lending resumed just a few short months later.



I'm not making any defined resolutions for 2011, but there are going to be some changes coming to the blog. Over the weekend I looked over this site's stats and there are several thousand hits each month, and about a dozen different countries with readers in a typical month. We never started this with the intent to attract readers, it was more to keep track of our own thoughts - in fact, if I'd realized how many readers there were I might have been somewhat less blasé in many of my comments. Further, we deleted a large number of posts due to potential compliance issues with a, now former, employer, which was unfortunate.

So, on that note, please make a comment if there is something in particular you'd like to see more or less of, and we'll see what we can do. Don't count on us cleaning up our language or formalizing our style (sourcing is for sell-side research teams!), but I'd like to post more of what folks are interested in.

Go Team 2011!