Mark
Adelson is an independent consultant and the content director at Portfolio Management Research (f/k/a/ Institutional Investor
Journals). He was the chief strategy officer of the BondFactor
Company, LLC from November 2012 to April 2016. Adelson was
Standard & Poor's chief credit officer from
May 2008 to December 2011 and then held a research position at the
company through August 2012. As chief credit officer, he
was responsible for supervising key changes to S&P's rating
methodologies in response to the global financial crisis. Under his leadership, S&P reaffirmed its
commitment to a unified system of rating definitions to enhance the
comparability of credit ratings across different product areas. Also, to promote both clarity for investors
and consistency of ratings across sectors, he supervised extensive overhauls of
the analytic methodologies for several key fixed income sectors, including the
following:
Prior to joining S&P, Adelson had been a vocal critic of rating
agencies' trend toward laxity and had written extensively about credit ratings
and rating agency practices.
Adelson attended college at Princeton, where he majored in economics.
He received the John Glover Wilson Memorial Award for his senior thesis
titled The Application of Fast
n-Transaction Filters by Zero Cost Traders in Imperfect Capital Markets. After Princeton, he attended law school at
the University of Michigan. After
graduating from law school in 1985, he practiced law at the firm of Thacher Proffitt
& Wood, where he worked on mortgage-backed securities transactions and
related regulatory matters.
In October 1991, Adelson left the law and moved to Moody's Investors
Service, where he stayed for 9½ years.
He started in the asset-backed commercial paper area as a senior
analyst. From 1995 through January 2001,
he was a managing director in Moody's structured finance group and, at various
times, headed or co-headed Moody's ABS, MBS, and ABCP teams.
In February 2001, Adelson moved to Nomura Securities as the head of
structured finance research within the fixed income research group. At Nomura he authored numerous reports on a
wide variety of securitization topics and worked closely with other members of
the fixed income division toward enhancing Nomura's securitization activities.
In July 2007 Adelson left Nomura and founded Adelson & Jacob Consulting, LLC with his former boss from Nomura, David Jacob. The firm specialized in the areas of securitization and real estate consulting and operated from July 2007 until May 2008, when Adelson moved to S&P and Jacob followed a few months later. While it operated, the consulting firm helped numerous customers navigate through the challenges of the early phases of the financial crisis.
Adelson was the editor of The Journal of Structured Finance from November 2015 to June 2023, when it was consolidated into The Journal of Fixed Income.
Since 2003, Adelson has served as chairman and treasurer of the Anna Sobol Levy Foundation. The foundation provides fellowships for U.S. college graduates to study in Israel at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya. The purpose of the fellowship program is to provide future U.S. leaders considering military or government service with the opportunity to learn first-hand about Middle-East regional politics, culture, and security affairs, and to study foreign languages. Fellows gain direct exposure to Israel's unusually challenging defense and security situation and to Israel's approaches to counter-terrorism and low-intensity conflict.
Mark Adelson's curriculum vitae
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