Theoretically, corporate debt is economically equivalent to safe debt minus a put option on the firm’s assets. We empirically show that indeed portfolios of long Treasuries and short traded put options ("pseudo bonds") closely match the properties of traded corporate bonds. Pseudo bonds...

The explosion of corporate risk management programs in the early 1990s was a hasty and ill-conceived reaction by U.S. corporations to the great "derivatives disasters" of that period. Anxious to avoid the fate of Barings and Procter & Gamble, most top executives were more concerned about crisis...

Finite risk reinsurance has become the subject of investigations, litigation, and possibly new regulation. This article provides an overview of finite risk solutions and products, describing their main features and their legitimate role in helping (mainly) industrial companies manage timing,...

In the last decade, three innovations in commercial loan-based securities and derivative have enabled institutional investors to access commercial loan markets "on leveraged terms": collateralized loan obligations (CLOs); loan-based total return swaps; and leveraged loan-based structured notes...

As developing countries search for ways to promote capital formation through the establishment of organized exchanges, they will need to pay more attention to the role of risk management in the securities settlement process. The delivery-versus-payment (DVP) agents that facilitate the process of...

Financial executives of companies that face a sharp increase in business or financial risks have two basic ways of protecting the solvency and strategic viability of their organizations: they can transfer those risks using insurance or derivatives; or they can raise additional capital, typically...

During the credit and liquidity crisis in 2007 and 2008, banks found themselves largely unable to raise significant new equity quickly from parties other than sovereign wealth funds and governments. Some banks have thus recently begun to consider contingent capital as a means of pre-arranging...