Bear Stearns Shakes the CDO Honey Pot
By Matthew Goldstein - Senior Writer
TheStreet.com August 5, 2005

"There are huge transparency issues,'' says Janet Tavakoli, a structured finance and derivatives consultant and the author of a book on CDOs. "In some cases, investors have been taken in by hype. Some investors don't know what they are getting into."

Tavakoli says buyers typically only care about how much yield a CDO will throw off. Rarely do they inquire about how the underlying assets will be valued, or whether there's a secondary market for trading them.

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Janet Tavakoli is the president of Tavakoli Structured Finance, a Chicago-based firm that provides consulting to financial institutions and institutional investors. Ms. Tavakoli has more than 20 years of experience in senior investment banking positions, trading, structuring and marketing structured financial products. She is a former adjunct professor of derivatives at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business. She is the author of: Credit Derivatives & Synthetic Structures (John Wiley & Sons, 1998, 2001), Structured Finance & Collateralized Debt Obligations (John Wiley & Sons, 2008).

Janet Tavakoli's book on the global financial meltdown is Dear Mr. Buffett: What An Investor Learns 1,269 Miles From Wall Street (Wiley 2009).

Clients of Tavakoli Structured Finance have the benefit of proprietary consultation, which is not available in any other paid or public forum. Clients also commission proprietary research and analysis.

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