 More distinctly, financial assets are defined as promises of future money payments (Mishkin 2016, Pilbeam 2010). If the credit theory of money is correct, they can be regarded as meta-promises: promises on promises. The level of abstraction can sometimes become enormous: For example, a “synthetic collateralized debt obligation” (or “synthetic CDO”), a form of derivative common before the financial crisis, is a promise from person A (the seller) to person B (the buyer) that some persons C to I (speculators) will pay an amount of money depending on the losses incurred by person J (the holder of an underlying derivative), which typically depend on certain portions (so-called tranches) of the cash flow from persons K to Q (mortgage borrowers) originally promised to persons R to X (mortgage lenders) but then sold to person Y (the originator of the underlying derivative). The function of a synthetic CDO is mainly to spread financial risks more thinly between different speculators.