Collaterization of Debt Around since 1999???

I stumbled across a paper on Japan's Lost Decade banking crash that proposed utilizing securitization and sales of bad debt to remove them from a bank's balance sheets.  Sound familiar?
The paper describes Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs) and mezzinine tranches methods to implement the scheme.

I don't know what is more alarming: the fact that the paper refers to CLOs as a feasible scheme or the fact that these concepts were already known back in 1999!