Rather, they package them and sell them to other intermediaries that in turn securitize the collection of mortgage loans and resell them, often to investors in Asia and Europe.
ASIC has been called out for its ineffectiveness since the early 1990s, complains Allan Fels, a former chairman of the competition commission. What's different now?
A 2011 survey by Coller Capital, a private-equity investor, found that half the industry's backers have at least one zombie-run fund in their portfolio.
And then you also have any bank which has more longer-dated securities investments that they've made around, you know, longer-dated US treasuries and things like that.
Almost all the employees in his brokerage firm, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, were kept out of that part, and had no idea what went on inside.
Vision Capital, based in London, specialises in buying entire portfolios of companies previously owned by private-equity firms, thereby taking over the assets of a zombie fund.
In 2015 American money-market funds were liberated from having to use credit ratings as their only metric for deciding whether to invest in securities.
(Laughter) My side is that cryptocurrencies are not investment securities and they should not be regulated by financial regulators in the United States or anywhere else.
Rather than paying out money with no prospect of a return, investors would far rather see the underlying portfolio companies sold, even at a loss, and the fund wound up.
Now, on the class who take an active interest in their stock exchange investments, especially if they are employing borrowed funds, this naturally exerts a very depressing influence.