But what happened was -- is that when the housing market started going down, then all these financial instruments that were built on a steady stream of payments for mortgages, they all went bust, and that helped to trigger the entire crisis.

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Perhaps the biggest question of all concerns the complexity of these instruments.

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While the three main reasons presented above are all pros to using convertible notes in consumer, there are definite downsides to these instruments.

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We have all of these ETFs with their sophisticated (and unsophisticated, some of them are very simple indeed) mixtures of financial instruments.

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