In a sign that part of the securitisation market may be thawing out, UBS is marketing a collateralised debt obligation backed by credit derivatives that are mostly tied to investment-grade corporate bonds.

Collateralised debt obligations, or CDOs, are structures that bundle diversified pools of bonds, loans or derivatives, and then sell new securities whose payment streams come from the performance of the underlying assets. CDOs, which are said to be "synthetic" when their underlying assets are derivatives and not securities, were blamed for the near collapse of insurance titan American International Group and were at the heart of the Securities and Exchange Commission's case against Goldman Sachs Group earlier this year.