Materials
Participants will be provided with a package of materials useful to the structuring and analysis of specially tailored financing techniques, including pertinent articles, rating agency reports and sample documentation from actual deals done in North America and elsewhere.

Instructors
Ian Giddy has taught finance at NYU, Columbia, Wharton, Chicago and in 40 countries abroad for the past two decades. He was Director of International Fixed Income Research at Drexel Burnham Lambert from 1986 to 1989. The author of more than fifty articles on international finance, he has served at the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Treasury and has been a consultant with numerous corporations and financial institutions in the U.S. and abroad. As a banker and consultant he has been involved in the growth of the ABS market in the USA, Europe and Asia. He is the author or co-author of The International Money Market, The Handbook of International Finance, Cases in International Finance, Global Financial Markets, Asset Securitization in Asia and The Hudson River Watertrail Guide.

We offer an economic cost-benefit analysis of these techniques, an insight into the legal, accounting, tax and regulatory principles, and the balance sheet risks and how they can be managed using debt and derivatives as tools of asset-liability management.

The workshop will include case studies of actual financings, as well as hands-on exercises, and will give participants the opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of deals through presentations and discussions. 

Some of the issues to be explored:

• What is structured finance? Why and when should companies consider the use of structured financing techniques?
  
• What are the key legal and credit issues surrounding asset-backed financing, and how can they be satisfied?
• How have developments in the CDO market affected the credit markets?
  
• Synthetic ABS: how do they really work, and what are their strengths and shortcomings? How are credit derivatives used in conjunction with synthetics?
  
• What role does "duration analysis" play in a pension funds immunization strategy?
• How can duration, convexity and immunization techniques be applied to a mortgage portfolio?
• What can these concepts tell us about how mortgage portfolios should be funded?
  
• How do equity-linked financing techniques such as convertible bonds work, and when does it make sense to use them? How are they priced?
• What are the techniques of asset-liability management, and how can they be applied at CMHC?