He added that he wouldn't want to see "ripples" in other classes of assets.
Given the downturn in the mortgage market, he said that investors are looking for new classes of assets that will provide dependable revenue streams over many years.
Despite the uncertainty that had burst the technology bubble and roiled financial markets, he wrote: "New classes of assets are driving value and creating wealth.
And while there are those who can remember when stocks were cheaper relative to other classes of assets — like bonds, real estate and commodities — stocks are inexpensive.
These priorities may attach either to the proceeds from the entire estate or only to those from certain classes of assets.
Simon Samuels, an analyst at Barclays, has looked at how different banks risk-weight similar classes of assets such as corporate loans, and has also found wide divergence.Regulators are responding.
(The Dodd-Frank Act constrained the ability of the Fed to help individual financial institutions, but in my assessment left the door open to various kinds of broader assistance to classes of assets or groups of companies — either through the Fed discount window for lending to banks or through some mechanism to be specified later).
The Wellcome Trust itself is managing a greater portion of its assets directly but still uses up to 50 partners in areas where it feels it has no expertise, such as early-stage venture capital, running hedge funds or investing across many classes of assets in Asia.
Third — and the mostly widely discussed option — the Fed could again expand the size of its balance sheet, which stands at about $2.3 trillion, by buying additional Treasury debts or mortgage-backed securities, or even other classes of assets, like municipal bonds.
Late Friday the dominoes were set in motion after Fitch downgraded Ambac's financial strength rating to double-A from triple-A, and it downgraded 420 classes of asset-backed securities transactions backed by insurance provided by an Ambac subsidiary.
First, there are entire classes of assets that are forbidden.
