Fitch Downgrades & Withdraws First Republic Investment Management's CDO Asset Manager Rating.CHICAGO -- Fitch Ratings Fitch Ratings An international rating agency for financial institutions, insurance companies, and corporate, sovereign, and municipal debt. Fitch Ratings has headquarters in New York and London and is wholly owned by FIMALAC of Paris. has downgraded First Republic Investment Management's (First Republic) CAM rating to a 'CAM3' from a 'CAM2' and simultaneously withdrawn the 'CAM3' rating. Fitch had previously placed First Republic's 'CAM2' rating on Rating Watch Negative in November 2007 due to CDO (Collaborative Data Objects) A programming interface from Microsoft for accessing MAPI-based e-mail, calendaring and scheduling servers. Originally called "OLE Messaging" and "Active Messaging," CDO wraps the Enhanced MAPI library into a COM object that provides the performance-related concerns. First Republic's outstanding CAM rating was re-scaled to match 2007 criteria prior to Fitch's annual review and CAM rating update. The rating downgrade Downgrade A negative change in the rating of a security. Notes: For example, an analyst may downgrade a stock from strong buy to buy, or a bond rating agency may downgrade a bond from AAA to AA. can primarily be attributed to the performance of First Republic's CDOs, the majority of which are collateralized by mezzanine structured finance assets. Fitch has reviewed the various performance metrics Performance metrics are measures of an organizations activities and performance. Performance metrics should support a range of stakeholder needs from customers, shareholders to employees [1]. of the team's outstanding CDOs; adverse collateral ratings migration in two of First Republic's four outstanding CDOs has resulted in rating downgrades and rating watch negative actions taken on multiple CDO tranches. A third CDO, issued in 2002, remains in distressed condition with overcollateralization ratios below 100%. Fitch rates CDO asset managers by asset class, on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the highest rating. The rating scale includes plus ('+') and minus ('-') designations, along with flat ratings. These ratings are based on a standardized scorecard methodology that includes factors in each of the seven groups as noted above. Fitch's rating definitions and the terms of use Terms of Use are rules set up by the owner of an intellectual property or service to govern how they may be legally used. In many cases, terms of service are used as a contractual agreement between a company and users of a service they provide. of such ratings are available on the agency's public site, www.fitchratings.com. Published ratings, criteria and methodologies are available from this site, at all times. Fitch's code of conduct, confidentiality, conflicts of interest, affiliate firewall, compliance and other relevant policies and procedures Policies and Procedures are a set of documents that describe an organization's policies for operation and the procedures necessary to fulfill the policies. They are often initiated because of some external requirement, such as environmental compliance or other governmental are also available from the 'Code of Conduct' section of this site. |
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