CalPERS appears to be a willing victim               Most of
these structured pools were created by banks desiring to take
mortgages off their books. In the investment world this was
deemed to be a positive because if anything went wrong with the
pools, the banks supposedly would have the liquidity to stand
behind them.  CalPERS' SIVs weren't that kind of SIV. Their
sponsors were a hedge fund and a couple of investment firms that
specialized in marketing exotic paper to sophisticated investors
-- such as CalPERS.  In fact, the investments were so risky that
by law they could be marketed only to investors as sophisticated
as CalPERS, which is always looking for "alternative"
investments to even out the ups and downs of stocks and bonds.
In some businesses, this is known as seeing the mark coming a
mile away.  CalPERS says it had no way of knowing what assets
were owned by the structured investment pools -- "no access to
any information on which to base a judgment of an SIV's
creditworthiness," it says in the