New Finance / Real Estate Course

TITLE: Special Topics: Securitization
COURSE NUMBER: FIN 742
TERM OFFERED: Winter A, 2006
SCHEDULE: Wednesday 7 - 10 p.m. Michigan Room
PREREQUISITES: FIN 503 OR FIN 513 OR FIN 551

WHO SHOULD TAKE IT: Students interested in careers in investment banking, commercial banking, and real estate, and those interested mortgage products and mortgage derivatives. The course should be useful to those who are interested in structuring securities and/or trading mortgages and mortgage derivatives and real estate professionals who expect to deal with the mortgage market.

COURSE SUMMARY: This course is an introduction to securitization, particularly as it has been applied to mortgage markets. There will be two parts to the course. The first part will focus on "tool-building." Focus will be on: understanding how mortgages are priced, the benefits and costs of securitization (both as business issues and as public policy) and the institutions and operations of American secondary mortgage markets. The second part will involve student analysis (in groups) of particular securitization structures. Students will be expected to do presentations on structures such as: "plain vanilla" mortgage pools, more complicated pools, like Collateralized Mortgage Obligations (CMOs), commercial mortgage backed securities, car loans and international securitization. Students will be expected to perform spread sheet analysis as well answer questions about the underlying business logic of the various structures.

TAUGHT BY: Professor Robert Van Order. He was Chief Economist of Freddie Mac from 1987 until 2003, where he was involved in a wide range of financial and mortgage market research and analysis. He was Senior Research Associate at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C, and he has worked at U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. He has consulted on mortgage markets in Sri Lanka, India, Latvia, Russia, Ghana, Nicaragua, Brazil, Egypt, Colombia, Poland and Pakistan. He has taught at UCLA and Wharton.

SYLLABUS: Click here for a preliminary syllabus.