But while Goldman was praised for its foresight, some argued its bets against the securities it created gave it a vested interest in their failure. These securities performed very poorly for the long investors and by April 2010, at least US$5 billion worth of the securities either carried "junk" ratings, or had defaulted. One CDO examined by critics which Goldman bet against, but also sold to investors, was the $800 million Hudson Mezzanine CDO issued in 2006. In the Senate Permanent Subcommittee hearings, Goldman executives stated that the company was trying to remove subprime securities from its books. Unable to sell them directly, it included them in the underlying securities of the CDO and took the short side, but critics McLean and Nocera complained the CDO prospectus did not explain this but described its contents as "'assets sourced from the Street', making it sound as though Goldman randomly selected the securities, instead of specifically creating a hedge for its own book." The CDO did not perform well and by March 2008—just 18 months after its issue—so many borrowers had defaulted that holders of the security paid out "about US$310 million to Goldman and others who had bet against it". Goldman's head of European fixed-income sales lamented in an email made public by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the "real bad feeling across European sales about some of the trades we did with clients" who had invested in the CDO. "The damage this has done to our franchise is very significant." Critics also complain that while Goldman's investors were large, ostensibly sophisticated banks and insurers, at least some of the CDO securities and their losses filtered down to small public agencies—"money used to run schools and fix potholes and fund municipal budgets". For example, an investor in Abacus, IKB Bank, "created a structured investment vehicle called Rhinebridge. Rhinebridge, like other SIVs, issued debt that it then used to buy mortgage-backed securities and CDOs like Abacus. The debt issued by Rhinebridge, ... was bought by among others, King County, Washington, which managed money on behalf of one hundred other public agencies. This was money used to run schools and fix potholes and fund municipal budgets . ... For all of Goldman's later claims that it dealt only with the most sophisticated of investors, the fact remained that those investors could be fiduciaries, investing on behalf of school districts, fire departments, pensioners, and municipalities all across the country."