Nomura Securities Co.
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Nomura Securities Co., Ltd. (野村證券株式会社 Nomura Shōken Kabushiki-gaisha?, NSC) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Nomura Holdings, Inc. (NHI), which forms part of the Nomura Group. NSC plays a central role in the securities business, the Group's core business. Established December 25, 1925 at Osaka, it is the oldest brokerage firm in Japan. It is named after its founder Tokushichi Nomura II, a wealthy Japanese stockbroking tycoon.
NSC provides a range of services through the capital markets including investment advisory services and fund raising.
Nomura is famous for inventing the conduit commercial mortgage, a process where Nomura lent money for investors to buy commercial properties with the goal of securitizing the loans into bonds. Since the profits were primarily from the securitization instead of the loans themselves, Nomura could offer lower interest rates than competitors, quickly making this form of mortgage extremely popular. However, this led to a large decline in Nomura's businesses, when in 1998, due to the Asian economic crisis and Russian defaults, massive amounts bonds of all kinds were sold in a flight to quality US government bonds. This caused a huge problem for Nomura's loans that it had made but not yet securitized, since the interest rates that the loans could be securitized at were now much lower then what Nomura had thought when it first made the loans.
On September 11th, 2001, Nomura Securities held offices in the 23rd and 25th floors of Building B of Two World Financial Center. No casualties were reported on that day from the company, but you can clearly see part of the World Trade Center tower coming into full contact with the building at that level. After the event, for some time, Nomura housed all operations in a set of offices in New Jersey.
[edit] External links
- Nomura Securities Co. (official site)
- Funding Universe: Nomura Securities Company, Limited (history of Nomura Securities)