Word: grades
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...have been about the only place to go; hardly any corporation can muster the credit worthiness to garner an AAA rating anymore. Here's where the potion gets its poison potential. Some individual parts of CDOs are about as base as bonds can be - some are not even investment grade. The assumption has been that even if the toxic waste bonds really stink, the quality tranches can keep the CDO above water. And life goes...
...financial engineers. Blame it on one of the Street's recent innovations, the collateralized debt obligation, or CDO. The recipe: buy home loans, blend them, then slice up the result into different securities (reflecting different levels of risk) to sell to investors. Many such securities carry AAA or "investment grade" ratings despite subprime mortgages being in the mix. From there, things get really complex--CDOs created from other CDOs, synthetic CDOs crafted from credit-default swaps, none of which had experienced a down market. "The problem is that CDOs were untested. There was not much history to suggest CDOs would...
...that the foundation is shaking, there are scant buyers for the lower-grade issues built on top of the pooled mortgages, and the values of those CDOs have plummeted. Losses in the subprime market drove Bear Stearns to declare two of its hedge funds, once topping $1.5 billion, all but worthless, and banks as far afield as Germany and France have frozen funds or received bailouts because of exposure to U.S. mortgages...
...sudden loss of leisure that comes with the burst of the New Year. For that is August's real purpose on the calendar, to be its dying days, before autumn comes and the air is fit to breathe again and everything starts over--football season, TV season, fourth grade and the chance to break all the resolutions made on vacation for the year ahead...
...music was pounding as sweaty bodies—including those of 10 Harvard students out for a night of Parisian revelry—rubbed up against each other, and, for the first time since seventh grade, I was shaking my hips to the beat of Will Smith’s “Miami.” For the most part, it was a pretty average night out in Paris. This time, though, we were not at a pricey discothèque but at a local firehouse, which was hosting an annual Bal des Pompiers party...