Friday, September 19, 2008

Fun pastime

I'll be writing my garbanzos off in the coming couple of days. One topic I must cover is William Lamson. His short balloon killer videos are really good stuff.

But if you need something to occupy your time over the weekend, let me suggest you read up on synthetic CDOs-squared, which are basically collateralized debt obligations whose underlying securities are not anything ordinary like mortgages or bonds, but are themselves collateralized debt obligations. Oftentimes the lower level CDOs are created solely so that they can be further bundled into their squared cousins. This does not violate any known Wall Street incest laws.

Once you are able to properly assign a fair market value to synthetic CDOs-squared, Hank Paulson has a really good job just lying around waiting for you. (Hint: they're decidedly not really good stuff.)

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