Merrill Lynch may sell 4 billion USD worth of non-performing assets

Merrill Lynch may have plans to sell about 4 billion USD worth of non-performing bonds including mortgages, CDOs and other structured products, The Wall Street Journal quoted from sources.

As the CDO market has dried up about a year ago, such assets are now hard to gauge their value.

In July this year, ML originally planned to sell 30.6 billion USD worth of CDO for 6.7 billion USD to privately operated Lone Star which let a lot of peole think that ML has gotten rid of most of its non-performing assets.

The global economic downturn let a lot of investors face the danger of depreciation of their assets value. Under such circumstances, ML joined the banks, hedge funds and other big investors in looking for buyers to buy up their hard to sell assets.

Investors need to reduce the loan amount which is being used for investments, the reason being more and more of such non-performing assets going on the market for sale. In the last 3 weeks, the amount waiting to sell in the Euro and US market have exceeded 12 billion USD.

Sources said that ML is trying to sell its non-performing assets by the end of the year. ML has send out documents to various possible buyers stating that it may sell part of its bonds starting from this week.