David Tesher - S&P David Tesher is a managing director in the global CDOs group at Standard & Poor’s. Tracy Pridgen - FGIC Tracy Pridgen is a managing director and head of CDOs at FGIC, which he joined earlier this year from Rabobank. Walter Gontarek - RBC Capital Markets Walter Gontarek is a managing director with RBC Capital Markets. He was recruited in 1999 to start its global credit derivatives sales and trading business and has also co-headed RBC’s CDO business since 2002. Michael L

Cash CDO creators have also continued to import synthetic market techniques to keep deals flowing. The correlation market disruption of April and May that followed the downgrades of Ford and GM seemed set to drive both investors and dealers from the synthetic market, and possibly cause fear of all forms of structured credit. Instead a number of hedge funds and bank proprietary dealers simply soaked up their trading losses, without the withdrawal of a single major player. Tranche prices corrected

David Tesher (S&P): From a cash perspective the challenge in the market, whether it is on the corporate side or the ABS side, has been the spread component. There has been a significant amount of compression in the spread on ABS assets as well as on leveraged loan assets. Regardless, we continue to see a robust pipeline for leveraged loan CLOs and CDO of ABS transactions. From a corporate backed perspective, we have rated for the first eight months of 2005, 48 CLO transactions versus 38 tran