Subprime mortgage crisis
Synthetic CDOs have been strongly criticized for making the Subprime mortgage crisis worse than it already was — or as journalists Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera put it — turning a "keg of dynamite" that was subprime loans "into the financial equivalent of a nuclear bomb". Zuckerman calls the growth of synthetics, "the secret to why debilitating losses resulted from a market that seemed small to most outsiders".