Using the criteria of the rating agencies, the authors tested how wide the AAA tranches created from residential mortgages can be. They found that the AAA ratings assigned to ABSs were not totally unreasonable but that the AAA ratings assigned to tranches of Mezz ABS CDOs cannot be justified

This chapter explains how the main types of credit derivatives work and how they are valued. Central to the valuation of credit derivatives is an estimation of the probability that reference entities will default. The chapter discusses both the risk-neutral probabilities of default implied from...

We define long shots as investment projects with four features: (1) low probabilities of success; (2) long gestation lags before any cash flows are realized; (3) large required up-front investments; and (4) very large payoffs (relative to initial investment) in the unlikely event of success....