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They feasted for years on your mortgage, and now the gluttons of wall street are morphing into vultures as they ready themselves and high end investors, to feast on your life insurance policy. Vultures or Vampires? It's hard to say, one will eat your flesh and one will suck your blood.
Sometimes I have to wonder if Wall Street and Bay Street serve any good purpose at all, except to siphon off value from the blood, sweat and tears of average workers and small businesses.
On Sept 5th, Jenny Anderson of the New York Times laid out in an article how Wall Street investment bankers are getting "back to business as usual" as they have, after searching high and low for another carcass to munch on, finally found one big enough to possibly fill their insatiable appetites for at least another few years, or until the next fiasco breaks.
I guess $38 Billion per day, every day, during the last quarter, just wasn't enough for Goldman Sachs to live on. After all, they are paying billions to their executives in the form of bonuses, so I guess they have bills to pay just like the rest of us. It is definitely a problem of perception I believe. Their perception is a return to "the good old days", while our perception is a return to uncertainty, bankruptcy, lost homes, lost jobs and lost dreams.
After selling billions in Credit default swaps, $2 Trillion in Exotic Derivatives no one could understand, and Mortgages sold to people who couldn't afford them, then packaged up by investment bankers who sold them to unwary investors in pieces and insured by foolish insurance companies like AIG, you would think that another scheme of the same sort, with potentially huge numbers (The market tops out over $26 Trillion so even a small piece of it will be enormous), would be out of the question at this point in history. However, if you are a vulture, you don't really care who's carcass you feed on, only that you feed!
People who own life insurance policies depend on them for much of their retirement income. It is precisely those who are targeted. The tastiest morsels are those middle class families with family members who are ill, or financially bankrupt who decide to "sell" their life insurance policy to make ends meet while they try to pay exorbitant fees for their health care, as their insurers abandon them.
Apparently, the ones who die the soonest, are the best food for these vultures!
You may have even noticed some of their offspring, invading those town hall meetings about health care and squawking about socialist medicine being their ruination.
Ruination indeed. Ruination of the middle class, instigated by the vultures of Wall Street.
Updates: Oct 11 NYT - Have the Banks no Shame?
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2 comments:
"Securitizing" life insurance does sound like a bad idea, but I'm still laughing at how you managed to tie this into the health care debate. SQUAWK!
The tie to the health care debate is threefold: 1)as we pointed out, the "tastiest morsels" for these vultures are families in financial distress trying to pay medical bills as their insurers abandon them. 2) there is no remortgaging a home whose mortgage is under water and 3) The movement is instigated and supported by the very same Wall Street lobby who caused this disaster and stands to benefit from a second, even larger calamity of it's own making.
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