Asset Backed Securities

Paul Davies of FT.com reports that almost $6.5bn worth of complex debt securities face fresh downgrades by Standard & Poor’s because of their exposure to US mortgage-backed bonds, the credit rating agency said Friday.The news will add to the pain for investors in such instruments and follows downgrades issued to $3.7bn worth of similar instruments on Thursday from S&P. In all, the agency has either downgraded or placed on review more than $77bn worth of collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) that have direct exposure to the crisis in the US mortgage markets. To read full article click here. […]

CNNMoney.com reports that even the American Dialect Society knows how risky home mortgages are these days.The group of wordsmiths chose “subprime” as 2007’s Word of the Year at its annual convention Friday. “‘Subprime’ has been around with bankers for awhile, but now everyone is talking about ‘subprime,”‘ said Wayne Glowka, a spokesman for the group and a dean at Reinhardt College in Waleska, Ga. “It’s affecting all kinds of people in all kinds of places.” About 80 members of the organization spent two days debating the merits of runners-up “Facebook,” “green,” “Googleganger” and “waterboarding” before voting for an adjective that means “a risky or less than ideal loan, mortgage or investment.” To read the full article click here. […]

Michael Hudson and Aparajita Saha-Bubna of the WSJ report that turmoil in the subprime-mortgage market fanned out yesterday, hitting a group of investments that are exposed to this struggling class of home loans. Moody’s Investors Service said yesterday it may cut its credit ratings on slices of 91 collateralized-debt obligations, or about $5 billion of securities. It is a small percentage of the overall CDO market, but still an important development, because it is a signal that subprime fallout is rippling through financial markets to an important class of investments. In another sign of these ripple effects, Fitch Ratings released a report yesterday raising cautionary flags about the commercial real-estate market. It projected rising defaults in this sector after years of increasingly lax lending standards, which could hit bonds backed by commercial real-estate loans. To read the full article click here. […]

Michael Hudson of the WSJ reports that twelve years ago, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. sent a vice president to California to check out First Alliance Mortgage Co. Lehman was thinking about tapping into First Alliance’s lucrative business of making “subprime” home loans to consumers with sketchy credit. The vice president, Eric Hibbert, wrote a memo describing First Alliance as a financial “sweat shop” specializing in “high pressure sales for people who are in a weak state.” At First Alliance, he said, employees leave their “ethics at the door.” The big Wall Street investment bank decided First Alliance wasn’t breaking any laws. Lehman went on to lend the mortgage company roughly $500 million and helped sell more than $700 million in bonds backed by First Alliance customers’ loans. But First Alliance later collapsed. Lehman landed in court, where a federal jury found the firm helped First Alliance defraud customers. Today, Lehman is a prime example of how Wall Street’s money and [...]