Just when things looked pretty bleak for special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, the markets have become bleaker still. Those highly engineered, cash-rich M&A platforms might have offered a timely balm to some of the pains the liquidity crunch brought on last summer. "They're funded vehicles in a world suffering from a severe liquidity crisis," as one hedge fund investor in SPACs puts it.

It hasn't worked out as many had hoped. Plunging capital markets and frozen credit markets have helped throttle many acquisition plays.