How financial products organize spatial networks: Analyzing collateralized debt obligations and collateralized loan obligations as “networked products”

During the 2010s, collateralized loan obligations rapidly became a trillion-dollar industry, mirroring the growth profile and peak value of its cousin—collateralized debt obligations—in the 2000s. Yet, despite similarities in product form and growth trajectory, surprisingly little is known about how these markets evolved spatially and relationally. This paper fills that knowledge gap by asking two questions: how did each network adapt to achieve scale at speed across different jurisdictions; and to what extent does the spatial and relational organization of today's collateralized loan obligation structuration network, mirror that of collateralized debt obligations pre-crisis? To answer those questions, we draw on the global financial networks approach, developing our own concept of the networked product to explore the agentic qualities of collateralized debt obligations and collateralized loan obligations—specifically how their technical and regulatory “needs” shape the roles and jurisdictions enrolled in a global financial network. We use social network analysis to map and analyze the evolving spatial and relational organization that nurtured this growth, drawing on data harvested from offering circulars. We find that collateralized debt obligations spread from the US to Europe through a process of transduplication—that similar role-based network relations were reproduced from one regulatory regime to another. We also find a strong correlation between pre-crisis collateralized debt obligation- and post-crisis collateralized loan obligation-global financial networks in both US$- and €-denominations, with often the same network participants involved in each. We conclude by reflecting on the prosaic way financial markets for ostensibly complex products reproduce and the capacity for network stabilities to produce market instabilities.

Financial Engineering and Portfolio Design Problem

Any financial institution is in charge of assigning to a client's portfolio a set of assets in a reliable way by minimizing the risk of loss and maximizing gain. All portfolios should share in an equitable way risky assets and safe assets with respect to a financial structured product such as CDO2 (collateralized debt obligation squared). Realizing a balanced portfolio requires a good level of diversification on the chosen assets. Many works have made proposals for modeling and solving the (OPD) problem, but each one has taken into account specific types of risks and cases. However, in this chapter, the authors introduce the problem in a general way by using the CDO2 structure. The authors focus in this chapter on the basic and useful notions of financial engineering, followed by a description of the financial portfolio structure CDO2, the most used and structured financial product. The chapter introduces the financial portfolio optimization problem through the CDO2 structure, the effect of the diversification on the efficiency of the financial portfolio.

Financialization as mathematization: The calculative and regulatory consequences of risk management

Financialization is commonly understood as the increasing centrality of financial actors and logics in the economy. However, building upon literature which relates financialization to the mathematization of financial valuation practices, this chapter argues that the banking sector was itself financialized since the 1980s. Our historical overview of the changing nature of banking traces the thread running from the Black-Scholes options pricing formula through to Value-at-Risk modelling and Collateralized Debt Obligation valuation. We explore the calculative and regulatory consequences of these risk management techniques and how they allowed large volumes of risk to be removed off banks’ balance sheets and regulatory capital minimized, with deleterious results for financial stability.

The Lemon-Squeezing Problem: Analytical and Computational Limitations in Collateralized Debt Obligation Evaluation

This article analyses collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), complex securities that were at the heart of the recent financial crisis. The difficulties of analysing these securities are considered, and it is argued that the increasing complexity of CDOs that repackaged mortgage-backed securities outpaced the returns available to investors, and therefore the resources available to pay for the analysis required to value the securities adequately within the timeframe available. CDOs therefore faced the problem of computational intractability. Such an outcome was, the article argues, inevitable in financial innovation that sought to create ever-higher returns from the fixed returns on a pool of assets. CDOs created what the article labels a lemon-squeezing problem. Implications for regulatory responses to the crisis are briefly explored.

Dynamic alpha-stable method for CDO pricing

The goal of this paper is to develop the dynamic alpha (α)-stable method for collateralized debt obligation (CDO) pricing based on the α-stable distributions, which will resolve the two issues caused by using traditional static factor copula method in the practice, which means when pricing CDOs, the traditional static factor Copula method does not only exhibit the correlation smile phenomenon which is not inconsistent with the model's assumption, but also cannot be used in pricing CDOs or credit portfolio derivatives for the underlying portfolio with different maturities. As the applications, we present calibration and empirical numerical results for iTraxx Europe Tranches quotes from the market data on March 30, 2007. Thus, our new method under the framework of the dynamic α-stable model is the way for CDO pricing in the practice, and should be useful for the risk management in the practice too.