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 r…
An examination of the relative value of securities in a corporation's capital structure, using the concept of contingent value analysis.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…