Janet Tavakoli, a Chicago consultant specializing in structured finance, takes a more malevolent view.
Merrill Lynch, Citigroup and UBS were the top three underwriters of structured finance CDOs last year.
Bair: So, I think derivatives and structured finance had a lot to do with it.
Before the market imploded, almost half the revenue of Moody's, a leading agency, came from structured finance.
And confidence in credit-card asset-backed securities is pretty firm despite paralysis in other corners of structured finance.
Janet Tavakoli, a structured finance consultant, points out that 14% of the deals listed were dated after 2005.
As and when the market for structured finance revives, it will be smaller and less rewarding than before.
As for SICO, a phone call to U.S. Pension Funding, a Structured Finance unit in Huntington Beach, Calif.
This week, growing problems with other trading strategies in credit derivatives and structured finance also came to a head.
Perhaps the most dangerous structured finance product of the last decade, collateralized debt and collateralized loan obligations are making a comeback.
Likewise a banker arranging a structured finance has a proportion of his bonus in the junior debt arising from that transaction.
Collateralized debt obligations (CDO) and other structured finance products trade over-the-counter rather than on an exchange, at least in the United States.
The complexity of structured finance made it difficult to know how losses would cascade down the ladder of investors in securitised assets.
The enforcement division is finally stepping in on the subprime issue, with investigations into how some banks participated in the structured finance business.
The secret, she said, lay in her patented structured finance vehicles, composed of distressed debt of "broken companies" that she repackaged as investment-grade securities.
"Many credible people were public about their dissatisfaction with the mortgage loan market, " says Janet Tavakoli, a structured finance expert with her own Chicago consulting firm.
There is continuing development in this field, as many new structured finance products are being developed to meet the requirements of Shariah but also conventional banks.
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They have made functional such techniques as portfolio diversification, hedging, structured finance, and credit scoring, all of which greatly reduce the riskiness of promises to repay.
This raises a very practical question: Is it physically possible for K2 Global to investigate and monitor so many entities (multiple entities may be involved in a single structured finance deal).
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Brown was careful to point out that the structured finance piece of MBIA will be completely separate from the municipal bond segment and will not be a burden on the latter.
Daniel Castro, the former head of structured finance research at Merrill Lynch, thinks some mortgage securities are such a screaming deal that he's setting up a hedge fund, Huxley Capital Management, to buy them.
Precisely one year after his return as chief executive of MBIA, JayBrownJay Brown formalized his plan to separate the insurer's municipal bond business from the structured finance business that has given it so much trouble.
Large parts of structured finance are dead.
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Ambac shares have lost 90% of their value since January 2007 and William Ackman, a short-seller who runs the hedge fund Pershing Square Capital, has railed against them (to his own benefit), saying the bond insurers could be insolvent by the second quarter because of their exposures to the structured finance market.
It turns out that in addition to being the most convoluted and complex creation ever conceived by JPM which is advising Europe on coming up with structured finance products that are so complex nobody will ask any questions and will automatically assume someone else has done the homework, it is also the quintessential ponzi instrument.
Vikram Pandit , Citigroup's (nyse: C - news - people ) new chief executive, is calling these "non-core" or "legacy" assets, and it's easy to conclude that he means all of the junk accumulated over the last few years of aggressive expansion into leveraged lending and structured finance at the direction of his predecessor, Charles Prince .
The details and potential losses of those structured-finance deals are only starting to emerge now.
They have examined, stress-tested and given ratings to some of the most exotic structured-finance instruments designed by investment bankers.
"I bring the knowledge of how a business should run according to Western standards -- specifically, how finance departments are structured, the typical financial reports that should be produced each month and what measurements they should be watching to help them gauge their success, " he told CNN.
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Automated Insights (ai), based in Durham, North Carolina, is on a mission to revolutionize the types of content that are powered by structured data, particularly in the world of sports, finance, and real estate.
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