The Collateralised Loan Obligations (CLOs) - a Primer

Book excerpt: The following descriptive paper surveys the various types of asset-backed securitisation (ABS) and provides a working definition of so-called collateralised loan obligations (CLOs), which allows issuers to sell large portfolios of commercial loans and their attendant credit risk directly to capital markets. Free of the common rhetoric and slogans, which sometimes substitute for understanding of the complex nature of structured finance, we describe the theoretical foundations of this specialised form of loan securitisation. The paper considers not only the distinctive properties and benefits of CLOs, but also the information economics inherent in the transfer of credit risk, in order to equally privilege the critical aspects of security design affecting the structure of CLO transactions.