The same Freepers who have seen the border fence, offshore drilling, nuke plants, refineries, etc., get tied up for years and years by lawsuits and lawyers, all of a sudden GET STUPID as to what would happen if that was allowed in this scenario....
As the credit crisis has unfolded, banks have been moving their assets into the level 3 category.
Merrill Lynch for example:
Merrill Says Level 3 Assets Jump 70% in First Quarter (Update3) By Joyce Moullakis May 6 2008 (Bloomberg) -- Merrill Lynch & Co. said so-called Level 3 assets climbed 70 percent in the first quarter, as the largest U.S. brokerage reclassified commercial mortgages and other assets as hard to value. Merrill's Level 3 assets, the firm's most difficult to value, rose to $82.4 billion as of March 28 from $48.6 billion at the end of December, according to a regulatory filing today. The New York-based company's ratio of Level 3 to total assets rose to 8 percent from 5 percent.
While many subprime-related assets that lost almost 100 percent of their value since July were categorized in Level 3, other holdings such as private-equity stakes, real estate and rarely traded corporate debt are also included because market prices for them aren't available.
How about Goldman
Goldman:Aug level 3 asset value $72.05B, 7% of total Last update: 10:57 a.m. EDT Oct. 10, 2007 By Bhattiprolu Murti Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS: 129.80, +21.80, +20.2%) said Wednesday the size of its level 3 assets at the end of third quarter increased to $72.05 billion from $54 billion at the end of the second quarter. In terms of percentage, the New York-based investment bank's third-quarter level 3 assets amounted to 7% of the total assets, compared with about 6% at the end of the second quarter. Level 3 assets are those that trade so infrequently that there is virtually no reliable market price for them, and valuations for these assets are based on management assumptions. The credit crisis has sparked concerns about the value of some of the assets investment banks hold on their balance sheets. Investors and analysts have been especially worried about banks' exposure to turmoil in the mortgage market and recent trouble in the financing of big leveraged buyouts.
_______________________
The problem affecting the broker dealers and money center banks is that starting in q1 2009 They will required to mark to market all their level 3 assets
My point is that much of these "toxic assets" can not be marked to market because the asset backing of these securities has vanished.
You don’t want oversight when you throw away hundreds of trillions of dollars on bad investments.