Financial alchemy is the process of transforming something of little value into something worth much more. The unfolding crisis in global financial markets is a result of the unpaid price of that financial alchemy.

How does this medieval-sounding madness apply to today's financial markets? As this letter suggests, the financial alchemy took subprime mortgages, leveraged buyout loans, and other financial assets and turned them into Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs), many of which received AAA ratings from agencies such as Moody's Corp. (NYSE: MCO) and McGraw Hill Companies' (NYSE: MHP) Standard & Poor's (S&P), in a process of shopping for ratings which I described here.

The upshot is that investors in Asia and Europe -- eager for higher returns (estimated at 22 basis points above treasury yields) and comforted by the AAA rating -- recycled the cash generated from record energy prices and trade surpluses with the U.S. into these CDOs. There are roughly $2 trillion such CDOs outstanding against which those investors borrowed as much as 13 times the amount they raised in equity from investors, up from nine to 10 times as recently as late 2005 -- let's say $20 trillion -- to amplify the returns on the CDOs.

Most investors probably think that when an investment ratings service like Moody's, Standard & Poors or Fitch gives a company, financial institution or security the highest rating of "AAA," it carries the least possible level of risk. Most investors would think that this rating would be reserved for United States Treasuries and only the most secure of companies like Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.A), Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ), or United Parcel Service (NYSE: UPS). Actually, this happens to be the case, and these companies are among the very few to receive AAA ratings outside of financial institutions.

So what happened in the case of the Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDOs), where the ratings agencies determined that high-risk securities batched together had a smaller chance of default than the individual securities? Perhaps that is the case, but triple-A? Well, it seems to me that large investment banks knew they needed the AAA ratings to have a marketable security. They went to the ratings agencies that understood this and the agencies created the rational or plausible deniability to support the rating. This may be a bit harsh, but it does seem that the ratings agencies were working in reverse: first establish the rating and then the support for the rating. The ratings services are all heading for cover and many of the previously AAA-rated securities are being re-evaluated.