Fire sales of the complex debt products at the heart of the credit crisis have increasingly been conducted closer to the public eye in recent weeks and lent much needed visibility to the going rate for these difficult to digest, or ‘toxic’ assets.

Deloitte and Goldman Sachs are halfway through a series of auctions to establish the value of assets held by four failed structured investment vehicles (SIVs) as part of a restructuring plan for these off-balance sheet funds that were a main pillar of the so-called shadow banking system.