Wednesday’s first panels at the ASF2012 conference were well attended, even as many of the conference goers packed and queued for taxis to the airport. A securitization pro told SI that little aside from business was done at the conference, as the industry battles market uncertainty and regulation that still looms large. “People don’t give us enough credit for being businesspeople,” he said. “We’re here to work.”
Parties were generally discrete, another industry executive said. “The latest party on Monday night ended at 10:30.”
Conference sessions were focused largely on regulation, the increasing role of ratings agencies in governing issuer behavior and improving disclosure to investors, in large part to increase confidence in the asset-backed securities sector and ensure a broad investment base for future deals. “If investors are really going to base their entire credit decisions on those assets, they need to understand those assets,” Goldman Sachs managing director Michael Millette said at one of Tuesday’s panels. John Di Paolo, principal at Prudential Fixed Income, echoed the sentiment at the Consumer ABS Traders and Researchers Roundtable, saying that in the event of another credit crunch, the industry needs to make sure that investors starved for information don’t begin to see ABS deals as “voodoo structures.”