Bowing to marketplace concerns, the Securities and Exchange Commission has once again extended the comment period for proposed rules affecting asset-backed securities. The comment period initially scheduled to end on March 28, will be extended until April 28.
Since 2010, the SEC has mulled rules that would bring greater transparency to asset-backed securities. The current proposal on the table calls for issuers to release detailed information about the loan level assets in an offering, gives investors more time to review the prospectus, requires executive attestation of the prospectus, and imposes the same disclosure requirements for public and private offerings. In February, the SEC floated the idea that, rather than submitting additional data to the public EDGAR database, issuers would need to create a private, password-protected Website as the depository for nearly 100 data points on each individual loan in the underlying pool. As part of the prospectus, potential investors would be allowed access.
