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# Kenneth D. Garbade

Kenneth D. Garbade is Senior Vice President, Money and Payments Studies Function, Research and Statistics Group, at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He is the author of Fixed Income Analytics (1996), Pricing Corporate Securities as Contingent Claims (2001), both published by the MIT Press, and other books.

## Birth of a Market

The U.S. Treasury Securities Market from the Great War to the Great Depression

The market for U.S. Treasury securities is a marvel of modern finance. In 2009 the Treasury auctioned $8.2 trillion of new securities, ranging from 4-day bills to 30-year bonds, in 283 offerings on 171 different days. By contrast, in the decade before World War I, there was only about$1 billion of interest-bearing Treasury debt outstanding, spread out over just six issues. New offerings were rare, and the debt was narrowly held, most of it owned by national banks. In Birth of a Market, Kenneth Garbade traces the development of the Treasury market from a financial backwater in the years before World War I to a multibillion dollar market on the eve of World War II.
Garbade focuses on Treasury debt management policies, describing the origins of several pillars of modern Treasury practice, including “regular and predictable” auction offerings and the integration of debt and cash management. He recounts the actions of Secretaries of the Treasury, from William McAdoo in the Wilson administration to Henry Morgenthau in the Roosevelt administration, and their responses to economic conditions. Garbade’s account covers the Treasury market in the two decades before World War I, how the Treasury financed the Great War, how it managed the postwar refinancing and paydowns, and how it financed the chronic deficits of the Great Depression. He concludes with an examination of aspects of modern Treasury debt management that grew out of developments from 1917 to 1939.

## Pricing Corporate Securities as Contingent Claims

In 1973, Fischer Black, Myron Scholes, and Robert Merton pointed out that securities issued by a corporation can be priced as claims whose values are contingent on the value of the enterprise as a whole. The notion of treating corporate securities as contingent claims is intrinsically important, but it is also important because it integrates a variety of otherwise loosely related topics, including equity risk, credit risk, seniority and subordination, early redemption of callable debt, and conversion of convertible debt.

Bringing together developments from the past thirty years in contingent valuation, this book examines the relative value of securities in a corporation's capital structure, including debt of different priorities, convertible debt, common stock, and warrants. The book emphasizes the importance of accounting for the institutional characteristics of default, bankruptcy, and voluntary recapitalization of a financially distressed firm, as well as the exercise of managerial discretion in calling debt for early redemption, servicing debt, paying dividends to common shareholders, and undertaking strategic actions such as leveraged recapitalizations and spin-offs.

## Fixed Income Analytics

Fixed Income Analytics brings together twenty influential papers written by Kenneth Garbade with members of the Cross Markets Research Group of Bankers Trust Company between 1983 and 1990. Written by and for practitioners in the U.S. Treasury securities markets, it is one of the few, if not only, books on fixed income analysis that focuses on applicable techniques while remaining analytically rigorous.

Divided into four parts, Fixed Income Analytics presents quantitative methodologies for the analysis of fixed income securities, such as U.S. Treasury bills, notes, bonds, and STRIPS that have no credit risk. Examined in part I are basic concepts of bond yield and bond duration; in part II, yield curves and the problem of assessing relative value; in part III, topics in fixed income portfolio management associated with change in the shape of the yield curve—yield curve trades, butterfly trades, and hedging—and in part IV, the characteristics and consequences of fluctuations in the shape of the yield curve.