The powers behind the loan
Thought that Wall Street still pulled the shots in LBO financing? Meet the real power brokers of the new world order — the people who run buy-side capital markets desks at private equity firms

Making it to the top: women reflect on changes in the CLO industry
As a growing number of women break the glass ceiling and take senior positions in CLO firms, Creditflux asked about the opportunities and challenges they face. By Michelle D’Souza

Genesis of a CLO desk
On the 10-year anniversary of Genesis CDO I, Creditflux analyses the development of Deutsche Bank’s structured credit desk. By Hugh Minch

Trading ideas for volatile times
Turmoil in the credit markets last month prompted a wide range of views and recommendations. Here is our pick of the most eye-catching research

From Suez to CLOs
Indosuez Capital blazed a trail in CLOs and its ex-staff are now pivotal players across the industry

Putting low rates under a microscope
Cho-Hoi Hui suggests using a double square-root process with a non-linear drift term to capture recent near-zero interest rates more accurately when pricing corporate bonds

Taking coupons into account
Sara Cecchetti and Antonio Di Cesare show that bond yields and spreads are not good indicators of default risk – and that coupon rate is an important driver of the yield curve

Unstirring cocos
Separating credit risk from the probability of conversion is the key to pricing cocos, argue Damiano Brigo, João Garcia and Nicola Pede

Indian banks: Bond holders face bumpy ride
India's sickly state-owned banks – which are widely owned by international credit investors – could soon be downgraded to junk

Credit default swaps stop fire sales
Companies with credit default swaps have more liquid bonds and tighter spreads than those that don’t because investors can hold their bonds after a downgrade

Gone but not forgotten
ACA Capital’s spectacular collapse heralded the demise of the monoline business and scattered its employees into jobs right across the credit space

The growing Swiss network
Defunct investment banks such as Lehman Brothers are not the only ones with a healthy diaspora of credit traders. UBS has a wide network of ex-colleagues.

Her Majesty’s secret CLO desk
They don’t know it, but through their ownership of nationalised RBS, UK taxpayers may hold the world’s biggest portfolio of CLO paper. Sayed Kadiri analyses RBS’s Stamford-based CLO business

Oh Brothers, where art thou?
Lehman Brothers’ collapse scattered one of the best regarded structured credit teams in the business around the investment banks and hedge funds of the world

All your CDS models are wrong
It is a common belief that it is simple to extract implied default probabilities from CDS spreads. But, argues Robert Jarrow, the conventional methods are drastically flawed

Mined in Paris. Forged in London
In Paris, an exclusive university has built a web of well educated and well connected credit traders, sales people and structurers who now circle the financial world

Taking Merton to the extremes
The most widely used credit risk model fails in a financial crisis. David Allen, Akhmad Kramadibrata, Robert Powell and Abhay Kumar Singh show how it can be improved

Measuring the bullet-proofing
How many defaults would it take to cause losses to CLO tranches?

Re-thinking recovery
Loss-given-default presents an even bigger modelling challenge than default probability. A re-sampling casts light on the best approach

Credit spotlight: Still loving it
Leverage is high but the fast food sector is doing well even as consumer spending falls – so it’s no surprise that credit investors are tucking into large portions

Stress testing your cocos
Joao Garcia and Nicola Pede look at how to value cocos and argue that the valuation model should cater for related equities and CDS being stressed by a systemic event

In defence of the Gaussian copula
It’s been called the model that killed Wall Street, but Jean-David Fermanian argues that the structured credit market’s Gaussian copula model has been unfairly maligned

Apidos - Credit’s true believers
Few CLO managers can boast they have never failed an OC test. Apidos can, and it wants the world to know about its track record

Spotlight on yellow pages - Find us under struggling businesses
Burdened with massive debts, battered by recession and losing advertisers to cheaper internet rivals, yellow pages companies are facing an unequal struggle to survive

The prudent choice
Managers at Pramerica Fixed Income (which is called Prudential outside the UK) believe it has the scale and track record needed to secure replacement mandates