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.

## 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.

## 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.