This financial engineering was a factor that spurred merger and acquisition activity, including corporate takeovers by private equity firms, as well as lending in markets such as the market for subprime mortgages in the United States. In many cases, these structured products have become increasingly complex and more difficult for investors to understand.
The securities often made use of leverage and contained layers of derivatives on top of various types of assets; assets that were packaged and repackaged, sold and resold, in a myriad of forms. In this complex process, transparency about the underlying credit was often lost.