So in addition to what each side's own intelligence services are able to pick up, the treaty provides additional information which has always been seen as being of great confidence-building value."
VOA: standard.2009.12.07
The idea is to get presence and scale, and pick up a lot of lesser-value sales, somewhat the way Google makes billions based on very small transactions.
So long-bond buyers in today's market run the risk of purchasing something that is extremely likely to lose value while gaining nothing or next to nothing in yield pick-up.
Goldman is accused of misleading investors because it allegedly didn't let investors know that a hedge fund which was betting that sub-prime mortgages would fall in value was helping to pick the securities that made up the portfolio.