Appeared on December 15, 2007
"The fact of the matter is, most everybody in the industry, certainly analysts, never thought too deeply about these instruments," said Joseph Mason, an associate professor of finance at Drexel University. "In fact," he said, "they're very different from equities, and they're very different from even traditional debt instruments. . . . It's a world that was really ill-suited for traditional equity analysts and even traditional debt analysts."