As the Financial Times noted during the fall of 2008, "the 2005 changes made clear that certain derivatives and financial transactions were exempt from provisions in the bankruptcy code that freeze a failed company's assets until a court decides how to apportion them among creditors." This radically altered the historic process of paying off creditors and did so just a few years prior to trillions of dollars in assets going into liquidation as a consequence of bankruptcies following from the global financial crisis of 2008.