The Wall Street Casino is now betting on your life

[marmar]

(Bloomberg) Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), Deutsche Bank AG (DBK) and JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), which bundled and sold billions of dollars of mortgage loans, now want to help investors bet on people’s deaths.

Pension funds sitting on more than $23 trillion of assets are buying insurance against the risk their members live longer than expected. Banks are looking to earn fees from packaging that risk into bonds and other securities to sell to investors. The hard part: Finding buyers willing to take the other side of bets that may take 20 years or more to play out.

“Banks are increasingly looking to offer derivative solutions,” said Nardeep Sangha, 43, chief executive officer of Abbey Life Assurance Co., a London-based Deutsche Bank unit that helps pension funds manage the risk of retirees living longer than expected. “Making the long maturity of the risks palatable for investors, including sovereign wealth funds, private-equity firms and specialist funds, is the challenge.”

As insurers reach the limit of how much pension-fund liability they’re willing to shoulder, companies such as JPMorgan and Prudential Plc (PRU) last year set up a trade group aimed at establishing and standardizing a secondary market for so- called longevity risks. They’re also developing indexes that measure mortality rates and securities to let pension funds pay fixed premiums to investors in return for coverage against major deviations from projections. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-16/death-derivatives-emerge-from-pension-risks-of-living-too-long.html

[SOS]

1. Place bets on your fellow Americans deaths

If they die young, KA-CHING!

Capitalism is a noble system.

[Angry Dragon]

2. feral boars at it again

they would pimp out their wives and daughters if they could make a buck

[Odin2005]

3. This shit is immoral beyond belief.

[marmar]

4. An economic system that has reached this level of depravity.....

..... is on its last legs.

[indepat]

6. Depravity: like that word for there's so much in the RW-controlled agenda that depravity is the

perfectly descriptive term. :patriot:

[originalpckelly]

5. And what's life insurance?

It's very similar you know. It's not life insurance, leave it to us to take something and turn it around into something completely opposite of the intent of the word.

You're not insuring against the risk of life when you buy life insurance. You're buying insurance in case you fucking croak and end up worm food.

It could not be a more black and white difference, it could not be even more opposite, life and death are almost black and white. And yet? We call it life insurance, so that you can sell it during dinner, and the little kiddies won't freak out.

But boner pills? Those are fine.

Have to love this world, this species, because we are so full of crap.