After two years of relative silence I am pleased to engage Enstruct again with the public. Starting toward the end of 2009 I made a strategic move to servicing only our private, in-house clients. This has been very successful method of conducting business with trainings conducted in 2010 and 2011 for major banking and investment clients in New York, Australia, and South Africa. However, during that time I received many requests for an updated public training calendar and began to understand the demand level. For that reason Enstruct is excited to run its first public course in two years in mid-2012.

In regards to other aspects of the training business there have been notable developments. The first is the publication of my fourth book: Financial Simulation Modeling in Excel: A Step-by-Step Guide, which was co-authored by my colleagues Michael Loh and Josh Laurito. Not only is this book an excellent addition to the Step-by-Step series published through Wiley Finance, but it marks the shift of delivering all electronic material through my website instead of CD-ROMs. This allows seamless delivery of electronic material to e-book readers.

Another development has been the addition of a course, which was piloted in 2011 with a private equity fund in New York City. This was largely a financial modeling course, but tailored to private equity fund investments and fund level analysis. It is the combination of updating nearly four years of our bestselling Corporate Financial Modeling course with private equity specific techniques used in my full-time investing position.

I look forward to updating many items on the website this year and disseminating information regarding our new course very shortly. As always, please feel free to contact me directly at keith.allman@enstructcorp.com if you have any questions.

Best regards,

Keith Allman

Dec. 18 (Bloomberg) — Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke is basing hundreds of billions in emergency lending on credit ratings from companies that gave AAA grades to toxic securities.

The Fed has purchased $308.5 billion in commercial paper and lent $631.8 billion under eight credit programs, most of which require appraisals of short-term debt and loan collateral by “major nationally recognized statistical ratings organizations.” That, in effect, means Moody’s Investors Service, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings.

It is foolhardy to rely on the three New York-based companies, said Keith Allman, chief executive officer of Enstruct Corp., which trains investors in financial modeling and asset valuation. The major raters issued top marks to $3.2 trillion in subprime mortgage-backed securities at the root of the financial crisis.

“They’re outsourcing the credit assessment to a group of people whose recent performance has been unbelievably bad,” said Allman, the New York-based author of three books on structured finance and a former vice president in Citigroup Inc.’s securitized markets unit. “If their goal is to not take a loss on these assets, they should be hiring independent analysts.”

Read more here.

Other related articles:

Fox joins battle cry for details of US bail-out

Fed Chairman Uses Incompetent Ratings Firms for Bailout

Four at Four: General Exhaustion

Forum – Wall Street Pit (USA Markets)

Keith Allman invited to speak on the opening panel: “THE CREDIT CRISIS AND LESSONS FOR SECURITIZATION IN CHINA” and invited to moderate a discussion on “COMPARING CHINA WITH OTHER EMERGING MARKETS.”

Please click here for more information.