TOKYO (S&P Global Ratings) Dec. 9, 2016--S&P Global Ratings today said it has released a Japanese-language Performance Watch report on the residential mortgage-secured pass-through notes issued by Japan Housing Finance Agency (JHF) and its predecessor, the former Government Housing Loan Corp. (GHLC). In the report, we mainly describe the performance trends of the pools of entrusted receivables backing the structured notes issued by the end of July 2016, broken down by either year of note issuance or year of underlying loan vintage. For JHF's regular monthly notes, we have observed continuous improvement in the underlying pools' replacement/withdrawal ratios as well as a surge in prepayment rates. We attribute the latter to the Bank of Japan's introduction of negative interest rates,
