On the contrary, commercial and investment banks initially benefited from the rapid development of structured financial instruments such as residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS), credit default swaps (CDSs) and collateralised debt obligations (CDOs)  BIS Review 49/2008  1  by actively managing their own credit portfolios, earning fees from originating, structuring and distributing these instruments and earning revenue from market-making and trading.
Despite such profits, the originate-and-distribute model, that is the ability to distribute credit risk away from one’s own balance sheet – through the use of structured products – to investors with an appetite for it, is at the heart of today’s financial market tensions.