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Showing posts from September, 2009

Scott: Overhaul Plan Could Create a 'Zombie Financial System at Great Public Expense'

The director of the independent and nonpartisan Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, Hal S. Scott of Harvard University, says that the Obama Administration’s proposal on the resolution of systemically-important financial institutions, if adopted, would lead to the creation of ‘a zombie financial system’ where financial institutions can neither die nor restructure sufficiently to be viable and where the burden of sustaining them falls on the taxpayer. The Committee recommends instead that financial institutions determined by Treasury to be systemically important should be resolved by the Federal Deposit Insurance Act and not under either bankruptcy law or the open bank assistance provided under a too-big-to-fail policy (or under a too-systemically-important-to-fail policy). Derivatives contracts could be sold rather than liquidated to limit systemic issues. Scott made his comments at a forum sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute where a panel of experts commented on his pre

Moody's: Mortgage Securitization Asset Markets Face Long and Bumpy Road to Recovery

The performance of securitized assets will continue to deteriorate for commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) into 2011 and possibly 2012, according to a new report by Moody's Investors Service. For residential mortgage-backed assets (RMBS), performance will decline into late 2010 or early 2011. The prospects for a recovery in securitization markets remain cloudy and depend on the bottoming of the housing market and the beginning of a decline in unemployment, the report concludes. When the markets return, a higher investor risk premium will mean a higher cost for securitizations. Demand by investors will be down significantly with the anticipated absence of the once-formidable special finance vehicle buyers of Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs). By Robert Stowe England MindOverMarket.blogspot.com September 15, 2009 “While there appears to be a glimmer at the end of the tunnel, it is still too early to interpret improvement or slowed deterioration in a particular sector as