On Sep 6, 2009, at 9:04 AM, Louis Proyect wrote:
NY Times, September 6, 2009
Back to Business
Wall Street Pursues Profit in Bundles of Life Insurance
By JENNY ANDERSON
After the mortgage business imploded last year, Wall Street
investment banks began searching for another big idea to make money.
They think they may have found one.
The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies
that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1
million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured
person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall
Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into
bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big
pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the
insurance die...
If this idea takes hold (and why shouldn't it?) I can, with 100%
certainty, predict the development in the US of an industry which had
never been thought of, let alone existed, in all of human history--the
manufacture of false diagnoses of fatal illnesses, with drugs to
simulate the symptoms of cancer, heart disease, organ failure etc.,
etc., and medical laboratories and clinics to provide the diagnoses.
Shane Mage
This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
kindling in measures and going out in measures."
Herakleitos of Ephesos
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