What happened to the ABCP market?
All ABCP money has been stuck in limbo since last summer, when credit markets ground to a halt on the fallout from the U.S. subprime mortgage mess. ABCP holdings were frozen, since no one wanted to buy ABCP that wasn’t sponsored by the big banks because of fears that it might contain subprime junk debt. In Canada, the market for about $32-billion worth of this debt froze completely in August 2007. About 2,000 retail investors hold some of the frozen Canadian ABCP, though their holdings amount to a fraction of the $32 billion.
