Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Hedge Funds & Private Equity: Bite-size Poison

Today "The Wall Street Journal" carried an article titled, " Investors Riding The 'Cash' Rapids". The point of the article was that this time it's different, risk has finally become manageable to the point of being a financial non-event. Why? Because the new template used by fund mangers utilizes the securitization of debt tthat supports investments. So defaults become affordable. The debt is made into bite-sized portions that can be eaten by financial appetites of all sizes. So if the worst happens in an investment, the effects are muffled because of the broadness of the participants.

That's novel. So financial poison is less lethal if more is distributed in smaller doses. But what about the half-life of financial poison? Doesn't it build up in the financial body until a critical mass of poison kills the polluted financial system? Caveat emptor.

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