Steve Waldman has a great post up deconstructing the Abacus CDO that was the source of the SECs charges against Goldman. What has become clear is that Abacus was not a synthetic CDO as those of us outside the industry understood them. It was a bespoke CDO — a CDO tranche designed to meet the needs of a particular client with the investment bank taking on the responsibility of hedging or laying off the risk relating to the rest of the CDO.
Because most of the tranches of a bespoke CDO are not sold, but are held on the books of the originating bank, bespoke CDOs are very different from synthetic CDOs — in particular their price structure is not market-tested. (See Steve Waldman for further details.) This raises three questions,
(i) To what degree have the investment banks been issuing bespoke CDOs, but presenting them to the public (and possibly to counterparties) as synthetic CDOs?
(ii) Were the losses that were attributed to super senior CDOs at Merrill Lynch and Citigroup really just unhedged (or perhaps poorly hedged) CDS exposure — just like AIG?
(iii) After 2008 is there any reason to believe that the investment banks as a group will ever be able to manage their CDS exposure wisely?
Synthetic Assets 
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