An excellent summary of the CDO situation: “….This appears to be the background to the Bear Stearns hedge fund problem today. Recently, US house prices have turned sharply down, so now the lending banks have asked for their money back and the hedge funds haven’t got it. So the collateral needs to be sold. No problem, surely. It’s in the books at a few billion dollars after all.But with its concentration of risk, the equity slice has been hemorrhaging value. No-one is bidding. But that’s not the full extent of the problem. There are so many similar hedge fund loans backed by questionable and illiquid securities at marked-up prices - untested by dealing on the open market - that the lending banks have stopped trying to sell for fear it will accelerate and exacerbate the problem into a full-grown systemic disaster, forcing every similar hedge fund out there to own up, catastrophically, to significant overvaluations in their CDO equity portfolios, too.

There is currently no market for this toxic waste. Everyone is taking a breather. All this came to light Thursday - and amazingly the US stock market went up. But it really could turn very nasty. Everyone with a hedge fund holding in any similar market is powerfully motivated to sell today.”