Ed. note: Last night was the Manhattan debut of the play Monetizing Emma. We sent Above The Law editors David Lat and Kashmir Hill to check it out. Here’s their review.
Over at Above The Law, we often write about the business side of law firms, but we don’t have the appreciation and knowledge of securities, futures, and the like that you Dealbreaker folks have. So Monetizing Emma, about the first-ever securitization of smart teenagers, was a nice little lesson for us, with its humanizing of the balance sheet.
Interestingly enough, playwright Felipe Ossa wrote the script several years ago, well before securitization became a household (and maybe dirty) word. The play is quite timely today, as we live through what characters in the play, set in 2013, refer to as “the Great Unwinding of 2009.”
An investment bank, Thackeray Walsh, is setting up a fund composed of some non-traditional assets: gifted youngsters. Investors can buy shares in the teenagers’ futures and will get a cut of their future earnings, in exchange for effectively funding low-interest loans for the kids’ college educations. If this idea sounds far-fetched to you, think again. (For the more technically oriented among you, who are curious about the nuts and bolts of securitizing teens, see this flowchart.)
Emma Dorfman is a 15-year-old gifted student that two Thackeray bankers want to securitize. A Jane-Austen-book-devouring nerd, Emma’s painfully shy and doesn’t want to be taken public.

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