Structured Credit Products: Credit Derivatives and Synthetic Securitisation, 2nd Edition

Preface

Never say never again . . . as James Bond once suggested, and an apt reference to make at the start of this, the Preface to the second edition of my book on credit derivatives, being published six years after the first one. I’d insisted that my book Bank Asset and Liability Management was definitely my last ever and that wild horses couldn’t drag me to write another. And yet here we are, a mere three years after the publication of that magnum opus, with me at my study desk in the middle of the night, penning arcane but hopefully accessible words on finance once more . . .

The 2007 credit and liquidity crunch was still being felt in 2008 and 2009 as the financial crisis helped tip global economies into recession. So there’s still much to talk about, not least the impact on credit derivatives and structured credit products, and I do hope that readers find the new material here to be of value.

We start with the premise that credit derivatives are ‘a good thing’. If you’re looking for someone to agree that they are ‘financial weapons of mass destruction’, or somehow ‘dangerous’, then look elsewhere because that person isn’t me. I didn’t start my career in credit derivatives (indeed, the market didn’t exist when I joined the London Stock Exchange in 1989), but I did start in finance and banking. Banks make the world go round. We can’t do without them: no one, whether government, corporate or individual, can function efficiently without credit. And, within banking, any tool ...