Roughly $300 billion in write-downs this year and what do financial institutions have to show for it? Ever-swelling coffers of still illiquid assets on their balance sheets.

The amount of those write-downs is as yet unknown, but many of the largest financial companies, including J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, have recently reported an increase in level three assets—the kind that do not trade and so cannot be marked to market but must be marked to management’s models. And if recent events have taught anything, it’s that models have a tendency to miss by wide margins.

More striking, perhaps, is the concurrent increase in level two assets—those that the Financial Accounting Standards Board defines as not actively traded but having “observable” inputs from the market prices of comparable securities. (Level one assets are those that are actively traded and easily valued.)