Tag Archives: Barclays

Goldman Sachs scooped up $6.2 billion in risky mortgage bonds from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the central bank said Wednesday. The Maiden Lane II assets stem from the taxpayer-funded bailout of American International Group during the financial crisis. An original senior loan in the amount of $19.5 billion needed repayment, and Credit Suisse offered an initial inquiry to pick up the tab for Maiden II assets last fall. The federal government held out on an offer until it felt the sale would mete out a higher rate of return for the public.

Partly in response to suits brought by the Federal Housing Finance Agency Friday, stocks for a number of the 17 companies-turned-defendants sank Tuesday, with Deutsche Bank leading the way down midday. Market watchers across the country offered up their reactions, with some portending considerable fallout for the economy and others waving away notions that a settlement by the banks would weaken the housing recovery. Deutsche, Barclays, Morgan Stanley, and others all saw their shares decline Tuesday midday.

Big lenders are set to unload up to $5 billion in commercial mortgage bonds, with planned securities offerings scheduled in September and October. Participating financial institutions include Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Citigroup Inc., Bank of America Corp., Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo & Co., Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, and JPMorgan Chase & Co. The upcoming bond sales are largely attributed to the effects of struggling U.S. employment numbers, the European debt crisis, and the resistance against debt.

Even as economic uncertainty and fears of a double-dip recession continue to rile the markets, some say that commercial mortgage-backed securities, recently on a downdraft, could either slowly recover over 2011 or see a fallback. According to experts, ongoing concerns about debt crises overseas and at home could dent a rebound for the CMBS markets. Stories by Bloomberg News, Retail Traffic magazine, coupled with data from Trepp Inc. and Barclays Capital, portray gray skies for CMBS.

In a prepared statement that it submitted to the Senate Financial Institutions Subcommittee, the American Bankers Association aired concerns about a dry-up in risk in the financial markets, an increasingly serious dilemma that it blamed on Congress for trying to prevent past mistakes from occurring again. The ABA delivered the statement in response to a new loan officer compensation law, a voluminous text with multiple rules and regulations that drove up costs and lost hours for brokers.

More hard times may be in store for brokers in the loan origination sector, which the Federal Reserve's new compensation rules already shrank by causing a wholesale market pullback in April, according to Barclays Capital. A weekly economic forecast by the firm offered a section entitled "Bye, bye broker" that predicts a flight by brokers to high-balance loans over the next several years. The analysts note that the barred yield-spread premiums (YSP) provided brokers with as much as 90 percent of their compensation in the past.