Chimera Investment Corporation

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Chimera Investment Corporation first quarter 2020 earnings conference call and webcast. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question at that time, simply press star and the number one on your telephone keypad. If your question has been answered, or you wish to remove yourself from the queue, please press the pound key. We ask that while posing your question, you pick up your headset to allow for optimal sound quality. It's now my pleasure to turn the floor over to Emily Moore of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Holly, and thank you, everyone, for participating in Chimera's first quarter earnings conference call. Before we begin, I'd like to review the Safe Harbor Statements. During this call, we will be making forward-looking statements, which are predictions, projections, or other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties, which are outlined in the Risk Factor section in our most recent annual and quarterly SEC filings. Actual events and results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements. We encourage you to read the forward-looking statement disclaimer in our earnings release in addition to our quarterly and annual filings. During the call today, we may also discuss non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to our SEC filings and earnings supplement for reconciliation to the most comparable GAAP measures. Additionally, the content of this conference call may contain time-sensitive information that is accurate only as of the date of this earnings call. We do not undertake and specifically disclaim any obligation to update or revise this information. I will now turn the conference over to our President and Chief Executive Officer, Matthew Lambiazzi. Please go ahead.

Welcome to the first quarter earnings call for Chimera Investment Corp. Joining on the call this morning is Mohit Maria, our CIO. Rob Colligan, our CFO, Chandra Yarladiga, our Chief Operating Officer, and Vic Falvo, the Head of our Capital Markets. We'll make some brief comments, then open up the call for questions. I'd like to start by saying that all the employees at Chimera are healthy and working remotely from home. We implemented our contingency work plan in early March and have not experienced any significant technology issues. We all hope that you and your families stay safe and healthy as well. In the month of March, the COVID-19 pandemic created an environment of fear and extreme uncertainty, resulting in near catastrophic conditions for the fixed income markets. Many investors felt that the government-mandated lockdowns would likely bring an economic recession, and they sold their credit investments while reinvesting into safer risk-off assets such as T-bills, U.S. Treasury notes, and cash. Credit-focused bond funds and ETFs saw record outflows. forcing fund managers to sell their holdings into thin markets, creating heightened volatility and market dislocations. All sectors of the fixed income market, apart from U.S. Treasuries, experienced sharp downward price movements. Some investors who used leverage as part of their strategies were also forced to sell assets as they attempted to meet margin calls from their repo lenders. Market conditions witnessed in March of 2020 were very similar to that experienced in the 2000 crisis. yet price movements were swift and occurred over a much shorter timeframe. The Federal Reserve was quick to respond, and on March 15th, a Sunday night, they announced many initiatives to combat the worsening of economic conditions. The federal funds rate was cut to 0%, new purchase plans for treasuries and agency mortgage-backed securities were implemented, and funding programs like the TALF and commercial paper facility were revived from the 2008 Federal Reserve playbook. The Fed's actions were largely helpful bringing order to many areas of the 16th market, including agency mortgage-backed securities. Liquidity programs for residential credit securities were not offered by the Federal Reserve, and they continued to trade in a challenged fashion in the secondary markets. Like the Fed, Congress also did its part by passing the CARES Act with the intent to help individuals most directly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The US economy is vastly different today than where it was prior to the COVID-19 crisis. The abrupt shutdown in the US economy has swiftly created some of the worst economic problems since the Great Depression. In the past six weeks, 30 million people have applied for unemployment benefits, a sharp contrast to the three and a half percent unemployment rate that we had in February. Many US homeowners have decided to take advantage of newly created mortgage forbearance programs. In the near term, The government initiatives coupled with mortgage forbearance will soften the immediate load of the U.S. economy. But these may have lasting negative impacts on the housing and mortgage market should they persist for an extended period. Over the past several years, Chimera has taken a number of balance sheet initiatives that helped it in this difficult period to protect our book value, to meet all the margin calls from our repo lenders, and to pay our dividends. Our agency mortgage-backed securities portfolio has always served dual purposes. primarily as a source of spread income and secondarily as a source of liquidity rather than selling our higher-yielding legacy assets. This quarter, we sold our agency past two securities to pay down debt and further deleverage our overall portfolio. We ended the first quarter at 2.2 times recourse leverage, down 35% from year-end. Over the past decade, we have purchased or acquired approximately a $14 billion portfolio of lengthy non-agency securities, and season low loan balance mortgages. This portfolio is funded through securitization as well as repo leverage, but it has not been immune to downward price movements. We've worked diligently to protect this portfolio, which has historically been a consistent driver of earnings for our company and makes Chimera's portfolio differentiated in the mortgage REIT industry. We remain hopeful that at some point in the future, the pricing of these assets reverts to its fundamental value rather than the illiquid pricing we're currently experiencing. A restarting of the economy should be a good first step in the process, which we believe could lead to an improvement in credit spreads and a recapturing of our lost book value experienced in the quarter. In the last two months, we've been busy executing transactions on the liability side of our balance sheet. In March, Chimera executed two mortgage-secured decisions totaling $883 million. We've arranged over $800 million of longer-term repo facilities for our credit assets, and we issued $374 million of convertible debt, which further diversifies our liability and capital structure. While pricing is never ideal in a crisis, we are heartened to be able to access the capital markets. Looking forward, it's hard to have a clear view on how the U.S. economy is going to perform as it starts back up. We are in uncharted waters with regard to the high unemployment and severe changes in social habits. We would love to believe that we'll be back to a V-shaped recovery, but it's most likely going to take longer and be difficult to get back to where we were in February. The mortgage and housing market outlook will also be challenging in the very near term. Mortgage forbearance adds a high degree of uncertainty to mortgage credit, and we will be cautious until we have more clarity on the forbearance duration and the totals in our portfolio. Given all these complexities, earnings for the next few quarters will be difficult to predict until the economic conditions clarify. We will remain focused on maintaining liquidity, extending our financing terms, and keeping our credit portfolio intact. We are navigating through a very turbulent period, but we are very hopeful that the U.S. economy will recover and the mortgage market will return to more normal footing when the economy restarts and people get back to work. And with that, I'll turn it over to Mohit.

Thank you, Matt. The first quarter of 2020 was an extremely volatile period in the U.S. fixed income market. The 10-year Treasury note began the year at 1.92% and fell 125 basis points to end the first quarter with a yield of 0.67%. The Treasury Reserve cut its overnight lending rate by 150 basis points over a two-week period as part of its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The large drop in interest rates, sharp increase in rate volatility, and investor flight to quality is a large imbalance of funds across most fixed income products. Investors that utilized leverage were forced to sell their securities at low prices to meet margin calls on existing repo transactions. Chimera was not immune. In the first quarter, we utilized a combination of cash balances, unplugged securities, and outright sales of our agency assets as part of our overall liquidity management strategy. Chimera has successfully met all market goals to date. Chimera's quick funding strategy is multifaceted. Our primary objective has been and continues to be utilizing securitization to create long-term funding for our credit assets. At the end of the first quarter, we have nearly $8.5 billion of securitized debt outstanding. Secondarily, we use repo financing on our retained assets, legacy non-agency securities, and loans. We typically use longer repo maturity dates when financing these assets, which enables more effective counterparty and portfolio management. And post-quarter end, we added two new long-term credit financing facilities, totaling $800 million. These facilities contain attractive features, including a significant reduction of daily market risk on our credit assets. We successfully continued our loan securitization strategy this quarter. And in March, we placed two deals with seasoned re-performing loans from our warehouse. CIM 2020-R1 has 391 million underlying loans with a weighted average coupon of 5% and a weighted average loan age of 158 months. The average loan size in the R1 securitization was 123,000 and it had an average FICA score of 613. we sold 312 million senior securities with a 2.35% cost of debt. Chimera retained a March 2023 calendar call option on the R1 securitization. In addition, we securitized CIM 2020-R2, which had a 492 million underlying loans with a weighted average coupon of 3.79%. and a weighted average loan age of 161 months. The average loan size in the R2 deal was 219,000 and had an average FICO of 690. We sold 352 million senior securities with a 2.55% cost of debt. In response to the significant drop in interest rates, increased price volatility and repo margin calls, this quarter we sold our entire portfolio of 5.7 billion residential agency pastors. These pastors were the most liquid and lowest yielding assets in our portfolio and have always been part of our strategy to meet our liquidity needs. We also terminated all our agency hedge positions comprised of U.S. Treasury note features and 4.1 billion notional balance on interest rate swaps. The agency CMBS portfolio, which has taken us many years to accumulate, was retained. As of the quarter end, this portfolio totaled $2.5 billion. We continue to like the spread income generated by this portfolio and the superior convexity profile of Ginnie Mae project loans relative to residential agency passers. These securities finance well in the repo market and have similar rates and haircuts as traditional agency passers. The unique characteristics of explicit prepayment lockout and penalties are valuable security trades as interest rates fall. After quarter ends, spreads on agency CMBS began to tighten when the Fed began purchasing these assets as part of their quantitative easing program. Portfolio activity this quarter has significantly reduced the company's risk exposure as measured by recourse leverage. We ended the quarter at 2.2 times recourse leverage, down from 3.4 times at year end, and 3.8 times at the end of the third quarter of 2019. This represents a 35% reduction of recourse leverage over the last three months and 42% over the past six months. It is important to note, due to current market conditions, our high-yield credit assets, which is the largest component of our portfolio, have been marked down in book value, have been marked down in value, which has contributed to Chimera's lower book value this quarter. Our ability to retain this portfolio enables the opportunity for security value increases over time as economy restarts and the country works its way through the current pandemic. As we move forward to the current economic crisis, we remain cautiously optimistic. We will continue to space after repo maturity and seek longer tenure for our credit repo. And as we get more visibility into the housing and mortgage economics resulting from the crisis, we will seek to deploy cash into new investment opportunities as we have for the past decade. I will now turn the call to Rob to discuss our financial results.

Thanks, Mohit. I'll review Chimera's financial highlights for the first quarter. Gap book value at the end of the first quarter was $12.45 per share. Our gap net loss for the first quarter was $389 million, or $2.08 per share. On a core basis, net income for the first quarter was $106 million, or $0.57 per share. Economic net interest income for the first quarter was $151 million. For the first quarter, the yield on average interest earning assets was 5.3%. Our average cost of funds was 3%, and our net interest spread was 2.3%. Total leverage for the first quarter was 4.7 to 1, while recourse leverage ended the quarter at 2.2 to one. Expenses for the first quarter, excluding servicing fees and transaction expenses, were 18.6 million, consistent with last quarter. Given the current market environment, we wanted to provide additional information about liquidity. We currently have approximately 650 million in cash and unencumbered assets. This is after we paid both our preferred and common stock dividends, totaling $111 million. Also in April, we closed a public convertible bond offering that raised $374 million. We believe it's important to have ample liquidity in this market and we're happy that the capital markets were open for us to achieve this goal. We will continue to monitor liquidity and assess opportunities to increase liquidity and balance supporting our current portfolio and finding new opportunities in the market. That concludes our remarks and we'll now open the call for questions.

Thank you. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. Again, star 1 for questions. We do ask that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up question to allow all callers a chance to pose their question. And our first question is going to come from the line of Doug Harder with Credit Suisse.

Thanks. Can you just talk about, you know, kind of, I guess, just how you're thinking about liquidity, you know, kind of as you mentioned in the agency, you know, acted as that kind of liquidity buffer. Just, you know, how you think about kind of with the absence of the agency RMBS portfolio, you know, what the right level of liquidity to hold today is in the current environment and kind of balancing that with the opportunity to deploy capital.

Well, yeah, thank you for the question. I think we are at a pretty good spot with liquidity at the moment with both cash and on capital. leveraged securities. I think it's kind of a day-by-day thing with us right now at the moment. We're looking at opportunities in the loan space. We're looking at a lot of stuff in the market. The market is dislocated. But, you know, it's about trying to make sure you have locked down financing and trying to make sure that you understand what kind of the price trajectories of the assets could be going forward. So, you know, I look at this as we've just come out of a a very chaotic period and everything is starting to settle down now. And I think we look at it, we feel pretty good about our cash positions and our liquidity at the moment. And I think it's a day-by-day process for us to really think about best opportunities in the market to start deploying capital. I think the loan space is still dislocated. There's a lot of overhang there. We think there's a lot of opportunity. It's just now for us, thinking about how we can start executing securitizations in this marketplace. And we've spent a lot of time with investors in our securitizations, a lot of time talking to the different capital providers in that space to see if we can get that market up and going again. And I think it's going to happen. It's just a matter of when now. And, again, we're coming out of this very chaotic market, and everything is a day-by-day process.

And, Doug, just to add on to what Matt said, In addition to the cash and unencumbered assets we have currently as of the end of April, we still have a core agency CMBS portfolio that's over $2 billion. And with the Fed also buying agency CMBS, it is a form of liquidity for us in the event there's further disruption in the market.

Great. And, Matt, just to follow up on your comment about, you know, kind of lockdowns, financing and securitization, would that be looking to kind of securitize some of the assets that are credit assets that are currently funded by repo, or would that be for kind of new assets? I guess just how are you thinking about that?

You know, I think it's a little bit of both. I think it's actually a couple of things. I think to get a deal done, you would probably want to Do what you can get done. So I think it's an interesting market from the sense that, you know, we don't have a lot of clarity on senior buyers and what they want to buy. I think maybe doing one of the deals that we have, a callable deal or something like that, would make most sense up front. But, yeah, we've been looking at packages of loans that are available for sale in the market right now. And I think there's a lot of, I think, very attractive assets out there. It's just trying to figure out the exit securitization for them. So, you know.

Yeah. Doug, again, sort of going back to our last earnings call and the focus for 2020, we had over eight deals and $5 billion of UPV that becomes callable over the calendar year 2020. And our hopes were to sort of tap the capital market and relever those structures. But to Matt's point, we are still evaluating that, obviously, with what happened in March and the securitization new issue market sort of being on pause. We think once the market stabilizes, that window will open up again. But as I mentioned on the opening remarks, we did complete two securitizations of loans from our warehouse lines in the midst of the crisis, both deals closing in March. We were able to successfully sell senior bonds. at pretty attractive levels. I think in the near term, those may not be available, but we are evaluating how to, one, pare down the warehouse lines further by securitizing and term financing those assets in addition to the re-lever strategy that we've employed over the last several years.

Great. Thank you, guys, for that answer.

Thank you. Our next question will come from the line of Eric Hagan with KBW.

Hey, thanks. Good morning, guys, and I hope you're doing well. You know, what's been the rate of borrowers in your portfolio asking for forbearance over the last, you know, call it six weeks or so? And how should we think about the impact of forbearance overall on the portfolio? Additionally, within the portfolio, the loan portfolio, can you just give us a breakdown of what the profile is, what sits in there at this point? I know that The majority of it is probably, you know, seasoned loan balance loans, but I know that there's some prime jumbo in there, some investor properties. Can you just give us a breakdown of what's in there? Thanks.

Hey, Eric. This is Mahit. You know, we just went through the April remit cycle, and nothing materially was different from what was experienced since March from a forbearance standpoint on our portfolio. But we do think that is going to uptick as sort of the COVID pandemic started in, middle of March, let's say, in the stride, and with the government announcing those programs, people probably took more advantage of that in April, and we probably expect May. So the next room in cycles will be more telling. I think it'll, given the profile of the portfolio itself, it'll track the way the GSE portfolios are performing, Fannie, Freddie, and Ginny. So as I said, as we get more numbers, we can report those on the Q2 earnings call, but nothing materially different as it stands today. Again, the vast majority of the portfolio is season-reperforming. It has over 150-plus months of seasoning. It's mid-600 FICO, and the effective WAC on the portfolio is just under 7%. The investor and some of the newer origination stuff that we have done over the last several years is a much smaller portion of the company, and it's not even consolidated in our balance sheet, so it's not part of any of the numbers reported there. As far as performance on the newly originated stuff goes, again, nothing materially different from the performance that we've seen through April. And like I said, I think we will see how May and June play out, but that's when we expect a larger uptick in people sort of choosing the forbearance and deferral paths.

Got it. Okay, great. Thank you very much for that. And then how should we think about the rate of just principal pay down and cash flow generally in the portfolio and what the assets are able to throw off as far as cash flow without the agency portfolio? Now, in other words, there's sort of a natural cash flow and liquidity balance that you can strike by having an agency portfolio. And I know that a lot of the assets in the portfolio at this point are subordinate in nature and structured. So how should we just think about – the ability to reduce leverage, if you will, naturally with cash flow, based on what the portfolio looks like today.

Thanks. I mean, as far as the way the portfolio is structured, I mean, we, to your point, have limited principal reinvestment risk, given most of our securities are locked up. So from a performance standpoint and interest collections standpoint, Again, going through the April min cycle, we didn't notice anything different in our collection, even on the retained portfolio. As far as delivering goes, the structures themselves, as I mentioned, we have $8.5 billion of secure debt outstanding, which is entitled to receive all the principal paydowns coming in on our re-REMICs as well as a loan portfolio. And that's how we're going to get the delivery, right? That number will go down as principal paydowns. on the retained position that we have that have delivered over time, you know, any dollar principal coming in will sort of gradually decrease the portfolio leverage. What we've also noticed post the expense that took place in mid-late March is the leverage in the system is overall lower, too, as haircuts from repo providers have also gone up. So I think that's also going to reduce the leverage, so you won't just have – significant amount of recourse leverage available to you, at least in the near term.

Got it. And then just following up on some comments and the opening remarks, what percentage of the book value impact in the first quarter was realized versus unrealized losses? Remarks? Thanks.

Yeah, it was mostly unrealized. We didn't sell a lot of our non-agency portfolio or obviously we didn't sell any loans that would have added an unrealized loss on those. We did sell some agencies and you'll see this when the financials come out tomorrow. But the agencies that we did sell, we actually had realized gains on those because we had purchased them a few years ago at lower levels and even given the disruption of the market, sold those with realized gains. So that's we didn't sell anything material at an unrealized loss. If any, I don't remember any.

And that really is our hope. We thought and we still think that the end of March, early April was just a crazy period in the marketplace. And you don't want to sell your assets and realize losses, especially the assets that we took so much time to gather, securitize, and we think are great assets to have. So, you know, we think at some point in the future that these asset prices are going to come back, and we want to ride the book value back up. And I think that's why we didn't realize or why we didn't sell into the liquidity void at the end of March.

Got it. Thank you very much, and stay well. Appreciate it.

And our next question is going to come from the line of Trevor Cranston with J&P Securities.

Hey, thanks. You touched on this a little bit, but I was wondering if you could provide some additional color on the terms you were able to get on the longer-term repo you were able to add in April. and maybe just some general commentary sort of on what haircuts and rates look like today versus maybe January and February, and kind of what you're seeing in the landscape in terms of how many counterparties are out there, if there's been a significant reduction in people who are willing to lend against loans or credit securities. Thanks.

Hey, Trevor, I'll start backwards with the latter part of your question, Matt. financing counterparties. We had over 20-plus counterparties that were financing our assets as we came into 2020. The vast majority of those counterparties will still finance, but some of the guys that were financing us, and the reason we had such a diverse group was because of the agency financing needs we had. As we've pared down the agency position, we reduced the overall number of counterparties that we were exposed to. just naturally because we didn't need them for financing those assets, but those counterparties still exist and are available to lend in the event we were to go back into and add agencies. On the credit side, same thing. Anybody that was financing us continues to finance us. As Rob just mentioned, we haven't really sold any assets on the credit side to affect that, and we've had sort of roles that have come up in March and post-March that are rolled without any issues. People have adjusted the cost of that financing and the haircuts associated with it, but the financing is still there. As we mentioned in our opening remarks, we have taken on an approach to add longer tenors on our repo to mitigate some of the market-to-market risk. We've entered into two different transactions currently totaling $800-plus million. and the tenor of those assets range anywhere between 12 to 24 months. We've always sort of kept our credit assets focused on longer tenor. We've done in the past two-year, three-year trades, and we're locking some of that up, again, given the uncertainty that we see coming in the coming months as it relates to forbearances and deferrals. And the cost of that financing is subject to what type of assets are being financed and the tenor. But as I mentioned, you know, generically, financing costs have gone up just for the cost of balance sheet.

Okay. That helps. Thank you. And then you talked about some opportunities potentially in the loan space for investment, although it sounds a little bit unclear exactly when you might be able to capitalize on some of that. Can you talk about how you're sort of balancing looking at opportunities such as those versus other things like just buying your own stock back. Thanks.

Sure. So as Matt mentioned, obviously the security side, which was in disarray in mid-late March, has come back pretty significantly in some of the spread tightening that's happened in April. I think where there's still opportunity is in the loan space. As you can recall from Q4 earnings call, there has been a lot of talk about non-QM loans and having partnerships and having a flow agreement. And as we've mentioned in the past, we never liked the convexity profile and the returns never really worked for us. Now, with where pricing is, it looked a lot more attractive. There was an overhang of supply. The technical side is also favorable with all the different originators sort of halting originations on that product. as a result of some of the codes that we're evaluating, but until we sort of get a clearer picture on where forbearances and deferrals shake out, we're going to just cautiously watch, and also looking at where the new issue market is to be able to securitize these assets, and that term financing will sort of finally lead to sort of deployment of capital. As we debate between buying stock versus assets, again, I mean, we will evaluate those opportunities and relation to the returns available.

Okay. Thank you for the comments.

Thank you. Our next question will come from the line of Matthew Howlett, Nomura.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Just on that question, if you bought back or you're looking at buying back any of the outstanding securitization debt, I'm assuming that's come down in price and if it has come down.

Yes, as far as the secured debt goes, obviously, like other spread products, that did widen as well in March. Buying that asset we didn't think was a good use of capital for us because otherwise the only reason we would buy it is to extinguish debt to be able to reliver it at a more opportune time, but that would take capital away, and right now cash is king, and with some of the uncertainty around preparedness, we didn't think that was the best use of capital, but again, as the market stabilize, and if that's still available, we will sort of evaluate. But we need to clear a picture on sort of the exit strategy on where that would be if you were to reliver in the future.

Our next question will come from the line of Stephen Laws with Raymond James. Good morning.

You know, following up on some similar questions, but, you know, you raised a little bit of money through the offering to improve the liquidity position. We've had some recovery in the unrealized losses, which I imagine has resulted in, you know, collateral being unlocked to you guys that you pledged previously to meet margin calls. So as things stabilize, your liquidity is improving, and I completely understand the concerns on the you know, new loans when you've got limited options on the financing side. So, you know, how do you think about buying back debt maybe versus stock? Additionally, you know, are there other things you would look to do given where we are in this cycle? I mean, would you consider stepping in and buying, you know, securities maybe that are below AAA but still investment grade that don't really seem to have a market at the right return for newly originated loans? Can you maybe talk about what some alternative investments might be and how you look at debt repurchases versus equity?

I'll start on the security side. The focus from the investment team is to look at sort of the best investment option relative to the risk and return profile. Loans, as I just mentioned earlier, create the largest opportunity, especially with that exist there and the need for capital to be deployed. But as you just mentioned, putting aside the AAA part of the capital structure, some of the AA's, single A's and triple B's, the investment grade stack has lagged and the credit curve overall is significantly steeper than it was at the start of the year, given the reach for assets. But we think, again, if those opportunities on those assets exist and leverage is available, you could potentially add those assets. Our thought is that the Fed effectively buying all other spread product outside of non-agency credit, from a relative value standpoint, those assets will look cheap and should create a good total return opportunity by some spread tightening as other investors sort of reach for yield as well. So again, we will continue to evaluate that. Like I said, loans present an opportunity. Just waiting to have your picture on where the securitization exit would be. We have some ideas on what we think we could exit that at and sort of backing into where that would equate to in the loan pricing. I think there's still a little bit of wood to chop there based on where people want to sell versus where the bid would be. So, again, continue to evaluate that opportunity. And when you say buying back debt, I don't know if you mean debt off of the securitizations we've issued in the past or?

Well, both, either, but your corporate debt or, I mean, your preferreds or debt off your, you know, securitizations.

I think we did see some of that. I think the way we're looking at things right now is that the number one priority here is we'd like to get a securitization model back up. I think, you know, We need to have securitization exits for assets, whether the things that we have on our balance sheet that we can call and relever or new assets to put on. And that's what we've been spending quite a bit of time looking at that market and figuring out ways that we can figure to restart it. And I think that'd be very beneficial for liquidity on our balance sheet once we get that figured out. I think the other thing that we've been working on and very diligently on is trying to figure out longer longer term financing for the credit assets on our balance sheet. And I think that's, you know, again, another one of these ongoing discussions and getting those things locked down. I think once we get those two pieces of the puzzle in place, we can sit back and really look around the landscape and decide whether we want to start buying back the stock or the and do those things. But we need to get a little bit farther away from the event and get things a little bit more settled with regard to financing and with regard to the securitization markets. And I think, you know, on a positive note, I think things are starting to percolate. So, you know, we're getting traction. I think, you know, I think we're seeing some positive things happen. So we're cautiously optimistic.

Great, appreciate the comments. Thank you.

Thank you. Our last question for the day will come from the line of Lee Cooperman with Omega Family.

Thank you. Look, clearly you guys have been very surprised by development. You've used the term twice on this call of being cautiously optimistic. Could one assume that the 30-cent dividend which you declared gets in connection with this offering you did? was something you felt was sustainable, assuming no surprises and things unfolded as you anticipate?

You know, Lee, I think the market is very – I still think it's a little difficult to really figure out. I've never seen a lot of the things that we're seeing in this marketplace. I've never seen the unemployment rate and the number of unemployed people going up as far as it has. I've never seen mortgage forbearance programs coming into play. That's just stuff that we have never, ever seen before. I could tell you that when we started the first quarter and when we started the second quarter, we're in totally different worlds with regard to the economy and projections and thinking about the business. I just don't think it's a prudent thing for any manager in this environment to say that they have a clear focus of what's going on in the future. We want to pay the highest dividend possible. We're all shareholders, but I think the visibility currently in the market with our business, and I think a lot of other businesses, is just not what it was a month ago or two months ago. You know, it's a very complicated, and I think, you know, we're being very cautious here. Optimistic, but being very cautious. Thank you. Good luck. Stay healthy. Thank you.

Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to Matt Lombiazzi for closing comments.

Listen, I want to thank everybody for joining the call today. We appreciate your support. I certainly want to say a shout-out to all of our employees at Chimera. You've worked brilliantly from home, and stay safe. They've done a great job, and we look forward to speaking to you again with the second quarter results later in the year.

Thank you. That will conclude today's conference call. We appreciate your participation. You may now disconnect.