Panel Sees Secondary-Market Bright Spots

While the private-label origination market for mortgage-backed securities has largely failed to revive, resecuritized deals are getting done, an active whole-loan market exists, and the GSE market is relatively favorable, according to panelists at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association's due diligence conference. These types of transactions are "the bulk of what [the secondary and securitized markets] will be seeing for the foreseeable future," said Susan Barnes, a managing director at Standard & Poor's. The government-sponsored enterprise market in particular is "moving," and while it is not as large as in years like 2004 and 2005, "the trend is good," said Rick Sorkin, vice president of structured transactions at Fannie Mae. SIFMA can be found on the Web at http://www.sifma.org.