Everything You Always Wanted to Know About CDOs (But Were Afraid to ...

Bill Bratton and I have a new paper out, called A Transactional Genealogy of Scandal:  from Michael Milken to Enron to Goldman Sachs.  The paper is about the development of the collateralized debt obligation (CDO) and its incessant connection to financial scandal, from its origins in Michael Milken transactions through Enron (who knew that Chewco was basically a CDO?) and then of course Goldman Sachs' Abacus 2007-AC1 transaction.  

The paper is chock full of scandalous transactional detail (my personal favorite is how the Federal Home Loan Bank Board interpreted its 1% junk bond investment limit to mean 11%), but it also has a larger theoretical move: the CDO is a particular type of special purpose entity (SPE) that is often used for regulatory and accounting arbitrage purposes. SPEs are a new form of corporate alter ego. Whereas the traditional alter ego such as the subsidiary or affiliate has equity control, the SPE is nominally independent, but is in fact controlled by pre-set contractual instructions. As a result, SPEs like CDOs that are used in regulatory and accounting arbitrage transactions are particularly prone to scandal even over minor compliance violations whenever there is red ink in a deal because of the mismatch between corporate formalities (protesting separateness) and economic realities (the alter ego).  Accounting treatment has caught up with the SPE, but corporate law has not. Yet because accounting gets incorporated into securities law, in particular, transaction engineers need to be particularly cognizant that liability may track the economic realities, not just the legal formalities of transactions.