Wanted: people to review CDOs

In light of the Goldman affair, the Financial Times says banks are rushing to review CDO deals they were involved in to ensure they can't be accused of anything untoward.

"We're pulling out every CDO and triple-checking there was nothing wrong with it," the paper quotes one, 'bank chief' as saying.

This sounds like good news for anyone with CDO expertise. Their public standing went from bad to worse over the weekend after emails from Fabrice Tourre surfaced accusing their creations of being 'pure intellectual masturbation'.

However, structured credit recruiters say it's unlikely to feed through to any additional hiring - or, at least, that it hasn't yet. "It's too soon to say whether this will create recruitment demand," says Alex Tracey of search firm CP Search. "A lot of structured finance advisory houses have been set up. Demand may surface there instead."

Terri Duhon, managing partner of B&B Structured Finance, a consulting firm, says she hasn't seen any requests from banks to review CDO structures. However, she does say that they're already very busy working on existing CDO litigation, much of which flies below the radar of the media.

Another former bank CDO structurer-turned consultant confirms that pre-existing litigation is where the work is currently. "There's been an awful lot of CDO litigation going on, typically involving German Landesbanks," he says. "It tends to be very hush hush and a lot of it is settled out of court."

Ex-CDO professionals are typically employed by consultancies on a contract basis, often as expert witnesses in court cases earning anything from 150-500 per hour.

Salespeople also wanted

More broadly, Tracey says demand for structured credit professionals to fill banking vacancies is still fairly dead: "Banks are making all their money in flow; the demand isn't there."

However, Russell Clarke of search firm FigTree says demand is resurfacing for structured credit salespeople: "Several houses are looking for structured credit salespeople for hedge funds, and structurers on the ABS side."

UBS, BofA and JPMorgan are among those understood to be looking for structured credit traders and salespeople in Europe currently.