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| Economy |
| CDOs For Dummies (Yes, Congress, We Are Looking At You) |
| 2010-04-26 |
| Every now and then, congressmen (and their staffers) have a knack of taking a terrific opportunity to investigate the alleged criminality at the apex of Wall Street (such as Tuesday's hearing with Darth Blankfein), and blow it by 1) pursuing personal agendas that have nothing to do with the matter at hand and 2) having no understanding of the matter at hand. And when the matter at hand is something as complex as CDOs (just ask Lloyd or Ben Bernanke - both will tell you that only Goldman understood these products well enough to trade them, and that only the Fed is smart enough to regulate them), televised embarrassment is sure to follow. Which is why we have prepared some bedside reading for all those who intend on grilling Lloyd on Tuesday. We start with the CDO bible which everyone should read (after all JPM created CDS - they know more about synthetics and structured products than anyone else): * The JPMorgan's CDO Handbook And just if there is any left over confusion we present: * The Citigroup General review of CDO Valuation Methods * Nomura's CDOs in Plain English (and update) * SocGen on Pricing Bespoke CDOs: latest developments * Morgan Stanley CDO Market Insights - Sub-Prime in Prime Time * UBS' CDO Insight And amusingly: * S&P's CDO spotlight - Overview of modeling methodology for commodity CDO structures * Moody's On the Relative Stability of Cash-Flow vs. Market-Value CDO Ratings Make us proud congress Can someone see if they can catch Maxine Waters |
| Posted by:tipper |