Friday, February 1, 2008

Help Wanted

Here's a job that is in big demand right now... securities litigators. On mortgage-backed securities:

“Anybody who touched the security in the process of creating or selling it is going to be subject to litigation,” said Joseph A. Grundfest, a business and law professor at Stanford and a former commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

4 comments:

Indiana said...

are you saying this is the direction you're headed in?

smokestack said...

Nope. but i definitely could go in this direction if i wanted to. i find securities law pretty interesting and blg has a large securities group. but i doubt ill end up there since i wont even be doing an articling rotation in the group

Mike D. said...

Do it! I've tried to understand how structured finance and mortgage-backed securities work since it's (I think?) how my company makes money, but I can't quite get my head around it. The basic concepts are easy but HOW they get implemented is what's crazy. So become a a securities lawyer and then explain it to me.

smokestack said...

The wikipedia articles on securitization and mortgage-based securities are pretty good. Look under the "Pooling and transfer" section on the securitization page to see how the initial security is created.

The gist of it is, some particular company or trust (called a special purpose vehicle or SPV) is set up by the initial owner of the mortgages to sell a pool of mortgages to. Then the capital to buy the pool of mortgages is raised by the SPV issuing shares or trust bonds. Those securities (the shares or trust bonds of the SPV) are then the mortgage-based securities.