ASF Aims at Restoring Confidence in MBS

The American Securitization Forum has launched ASF Project Restart, an industry-developed initiative to help rebuild investor confidence in mortgage- and asset-backed securities, restore capital flows to the securitization markets, and increase the availability of affordable credit to borrowers The first phase of the project is a proposed ASF RMBS Disclosure Package that standardizes and expands issuer disclosure to investors and credit rating agencies, particularly on mortgage loan-level information. It is geared toward producing uniform data that are reliable, understandable, consistent, and equally available to all market participants. ASF says the package will enable investors to more easily compare loans and transactions across issuers and perform loan-level analysis to evaluate residential MBS transactions based on the features and performance of the underlying mortgage loans. The loan-level detail will aid rating agency evaluations by enhancing the quality, consistency, and comparability of information relating to securitized assets. Comments on the proposal are due by Aug. 22. ASF said it expects to issue a final version before year's end for implementation in 2009.