Tavakoli Structured Finance, Inc.®
Janet Tavakoli, President
360 E. Randolph St. Suite 3007
Chicago, Illinois 60601 USA
(312) 540-0243
jt@tavakolistructuredfinance.com


Tavakoli Structured Finance ® (TSF®) provides expert experience and knowledge about maximizing value in the capital markets in the face of complexity and uncertainty. Clients include financial institutions, institutional investors, and corporations with a focus on corporate finance and structured finance.

Consulting

• Mergers, Sales, and Acquisitions
• Negotiations - Dispute Resolution without Lawyers
• Corporate Finance Solutions
• Securitization of Assets
• Derivatives and Credit Derivatives
• Special Purpose Entities, SPEs, Special Purpose Vehicles, SPVs - Corporate Finance.

Strategic Planning

Opportunistic revenue strategies Product development Competitive trends and best practices Global investor demand Global market growth trends

Articles

• See the news section for recently published articles by Janet Tavakoli.

Books

• Dear Mr. Buffett: What An Investor Learns 1,269 Miles From Wall Street, by Janet Tavakoli (Wiley: January, 2009). Now available on Amazon and in bookstores.

• Structured Finance & Collateralized Debt Obligations, John Wiley & Sons, September 2008. Click here for errata.
  • The Elusive Income of Synthetic CDOs (Clients Only) - Journal of Structured Finance - Winter 2006
  • Introduction to Collateralized Debt Obligations Article by Janet Tavakoli
  • Special Purpose Entities: Presentation to the Federal Reserve Conference on Bank Structure and Supervision May 2003 by Janet Tavakoli
  • Special Purpose Entities: Presentation to the International Monetary Fund - April 2005 by JanetTavakoli
  • Enron, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, and Offshore Special Purpose Vehicles Article by Janet Tavakoli
    
• Collateralized Debt Obligations and Structured Finance, John Wiley & Sons 2003, by Janet Tavakoli
  
  
• Credit Derivatives & Synthetic Structures, John Wiley & Sons 2001, by Janet Tavakoli
  • Credit Default Swaps - Introduction to Credit Derivatives Article by Janet Tavakoli
  • Total Return Swaps - Introduction to Credit Derivatives Article by Janet Tavakoli
    
    

Expert Consulting and Expert Witness Testimony

Engagements include representatives of plaintiffs or defendants depending on the issues. Plaintiff engagements include, among others, Bank of America N.A. et al. v. Bartmann, JPM Chase, et al. Total claims in the consolidated litigation exceeded $1.2 billion. In Re Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. Securities, Derivative and ERISA Litigation, 07-9633; total claims in the consolidated litigation were $550 million.

Tavakoli produces exceptional quality expert report writing and crisp, persuasive testimony. Representative clients: Helms Mullis & Wicker, Day Edwards, Mayer Brown, Susman Godfrey LLP, Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler, and Pomerantz Haudek Grossman & Gross LLP.

For your protection, the following protocol is enforced for all lawyers:

TSF will not accept phone calls or meetings prior to being retained. This prevents false claims by lawyers of having obtained a preliminary opinion and/or false claims that opposing counsel has conflicted out TSF from a case. Phone calls and meetings will be arranged only after TSF is retained.

The partner in charge of the case - with the authority to hire experts - should send either a letter or an email with the firm's full contact details, the case name, including all plaintiffs and defendants, and the requested scope of work. TSF will perform a conflicts check. If there is no conflict, TSF will send its terms and conditions of business. Once these terms are met and TSF is formally engaged, phone calls and meetings will be arranged.

TSF provides experienced expert consulting, report writing, rebuttal report writing and expert testimony in complex structured finance matters and the capital markets: securitization, asset backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, credit derivatives, special purpose entities, traditional derivatives, risk management, synthetic securities, and cash securities.

Definition of Structured Finance: Structured finance is a generic term referring to financings more complicated than traditional loans, vanilla bonds and common equity. Relatively simple transactions that lower corporations' funding costs by converting floating rate obligations to fixed rate obligations (or the opposite) through the use of interest rate swaps are traditionally considered structured finance transactions. Financial engineering involving special purpose entities is also considered a part of structured finance. Extremely complicated leveraged products such as constant proportion debt obligations (CPDOs) and complicated securitizations such as collateralized debt obligations of collateralized debt obligations (CDO^n) are also included in the definition of structured finance.

Key motivations for using structured finance include lowering funding costs, changes in debt and equity composition of the balance sheet, taking companies public or private, freeing up balance sheet capacity, monetizing balance sheet assets, financing assets, regulatory capital arbitrage, sheltering corporations from operating liabilities, tax management, financing leveraged buyouts, poison pill takeover defenses, hedge fund speculation, accounting rule compliance and leverage. The structures may address several issues at once including risk transfer, accounting, taxation, bankruptcy and credit enhancement.

Source: Tavakoli, J. Structured Finance & Collateralized Debt Obligations, John Wiley & Sons, 2003, 2008.

Definition of Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO) and CDO Arbitrage
Definition of Credit Derivative and Credit Default Swap
Definition of Special Purpose Entity / Special Purpose Vehicle
Definition of Total Return Swap

"Alternative" Finance Resources