Some instructors, however, emphasize portfolio and asset management problems. Each risk is studied separately, together with the technical tools available to measure and manage it, including forwards and futures and currency and interest rate swaps. The course ends with an examination of the causes and course of the great debt crisis of the 1980s, together with its aftermath in emerging markets. The course is designed primarily for those who intend to work in global banks or investment banking firms, and the consulting or capital markets professionals who serve banks' needs. The management of investment banking firms themselves is the subject of this course.
Emphasis is placed on how investment banks build relationships and solve problems for investors.
The course offers excellent background for all consultants, managers and corporate finance generalists. This course provides tools to study project costs and benefits from a perspective broader than the cash flows of the project itself. That is, it introduces concepts such as irreversibility, real options, the valuation of intangibles such as life, health and time, and public goods and externalities such as pollution. Optimal choices are considered from the perspectives of both the firm and society as a whole. The course is particularly useful for senior managers and consultants as well as those who contemplate working in or around the public and nonprofit sectors.