Sunday, October 11, 2009

"Death Bonds": Wall Street’s Shocking New Plan to Reap Billions off Dying Americans

AlterNet
By Mark Ames

It sounds too gruesome to be true, but the bankers have already shaken the silver out of everything that had value in America -- except for the elderly.

Now we know why America's oligarchs are fighting to keep the rest of us stuck in the world's worst health care system: the more we die, the more billions Wall Street will earn. A recent article in The New York Times exposed how Wall Street is licking its lips over a new scheme to make hundreds of billions in profits by creating financial instruments that will profit off of millions of terminally-ill Americans' agony, desperation, and death. The only thing standing in the way of this massive new Wall Street scheme is the kind of health care reform that might allow Americans to live longer lives. Yep, this is what we spent trillions of dollars bailing out Wall Street for: so that they can kill us for profit.

It sounds like something out of an old sci-fi flick like War of the Worlds, with America's billionaires as the brutal aliens harvesting our humanoid blood and tissue to fertilize their country club golf courses. Yet it makes logical sense: Wall Street has nowhere else to turn for its fat profits. Our banking class has already destroyed everything else in this country that had any value, from America's industrial base to the American Dream itself, its housing market--whatever Wall Street could securitize, leverage, flip or restructure, they destroyed for good. There's nothing left to strip and pawn -- except for our lives.

Yes, it's sick as hell, so vile and evil that it almost defies understanding. But I'll try: see, if I was a gambling man, I'd wager that the thing that gave our banker billionaires the idea to turn our deaths into "death bonds" was the way they so effortlessly looted trillions of taxpayer bailout dollars from us, so quickly, and with so little resistance. That puts bad ideas into bad people's heads. You and I, if we were the ones who got those trillions in our time of need (rather than having it stolen from us in our time of need), we might have a real sentimental epiphany, like, "Gee, the American taxpayers saved me from ruin! I promise from now on to change my ways and do whatever I can to repay these kind Americans!"

But in our real world, instead of having Scrooge epiphanies, our Wall Street bankers have Goodfelllas epiphanies. As in, "That was the easiest $23 trillion bucks anyone ever stole, fellas! Come on, let's go back and steal some more! There's gotta be a lot more where that came from!"

They're not only not scared of the consequences, they'd be crazy to worry given the recent evidence. By our passivity, we've emboldened our vampire-oligarchs to steal more from us, and drain our blood for good measure. So now they've come up with the most shameless profit scheme ever imagined: issuing "death bonds" and securities based on these "death bonds" which aim to profit from people suffering from agonizing terminal illnesses.

Here is how the Times explains it:

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.

The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return -- though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money. [Author's emphasis]
So let's get this straight: Wall Street needs its hundreds of billions in paper profits. That's a given. But since they've already destroyed everything else while plundering that wealth, now Wall Street is going to suck those profits directly out of our veins:
[E]ven if a small fraction of policy holders do sell them, some in the industry predict the market could reach $500 billion. That would help Wall Street offset the loss of revenue from the collapse of the United States residential mortgage securities market, to $169 billion so far this year from a peak of $941 billion in 2005, according to Dealogic, a firm that tracks financial data.
The most common defense of securitization you hear from finance apologists is that securitization lowers the price of borrowing--without securitization, home mortgages would have been much more expensive, they say (ignoring of course how securitizing subprime loans destroyed the entire real estate market for millions upon millions of Americans). But in the case of securitizing life insurance payouts, the effect right away will be higher premiums on new life insurance policies, according to a Wharton professor--meaning securitization won't even pretend to lower premiums, but rather will put life insurance out of more Americans' reach before destroying the entire industry.

So, guess who's planning to profit from our terminal illnesses? Yup, our ol' friends at Goldman Sachs. The Bailout Barons at Goldman are so excited by all that juicy death that they've already invented a kind of death index "enabling investors to bet on whether people will live longer than expected or die sooner than planned." That is not a made-up quote, folks: that's straight out of The New York Times business section.

Full article HERE

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Sheeple



The Black Sheep tries to warn its friends with the truth it has seen, unfortunately herd mentality kicks in for the Sheeple, and they run in fear from the black sheep and keep to the safety of their flock.

Having tried to no avail to awaken his peers, the Black Sheep have no other choice but to unite with each other and escape the impending doom.

What color Sheep are you?

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