The structured products business in the US has gotten very large recently — on track to hit $300 billion in sales this year. That they are all the rage means a once opaque financial product is getting a lot more attention. So what are structured products, exactly, and how are they influencing the economy? In short, structured products are basically a fusion of a bank IOU with a derivative product, but that underplays how complex these things are and how they are shaping market dynamics. What is particularly interesting about structured notes is how they've become a stand-in for how investors are betting on the AI trade — the ways these products are structured allow market actors to really capitalize on some of the turbulence we're seeing. On this episode, we speak with Alex Micalizzi, who is the international head of equity structured notes at Nomura, and he gives us what might be the clearest explanation of how structured products are created, how they work, and why sales in structured products have grown so much in the last year.
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