When I walked into the ABS East conference in Miami last week, the noise was so deafening that I almost walked right back out again.
Armies of finance bros from the biggest banks and private capital groups jammed ballrooms, cabanas and hallways to talk about asset-backed securities. Days of frenetic haggling in hundreds of temporary cubicles alternated with nights of celebratory cocktails.
The conference, now run by the FT, has been a dealmaking hub for years: it bills itself as the “most productive 72 hours in your structured finance year”. But participants agreed that the 2025 gathering, which drew a record 7,200 people, turned the dial up a notch, or even three. It felt like scenes from The Big Short, which depicted the lunacy of the mortgage-backed securities market right before the 2008 crash.