"Crazy Bitch"
LYRICS
BY BUCKCHERRY
Have been removed, if you’ve gotten this far and want the
lyrics “google” it
The only thing necessary for evil
to triumph over good
is for good men to do nothing
they all love
bribes and chase after
gifts.
Tyranny is legal when
tyrants make the rules
President James Madison
President Thomas Jefferson
President Andrew Jackson
“If
the American people ever allow private banks (The FEDERAL RESERVE BANK is a
private banking system, don't trust me, look it up) to control the issue of
their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks...will deprive
the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the
continent their fathers conquered... The issuing power should be taken from the
banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.
"President
Thomas Jefferson
Financial situation has gone
from bad to worse
The National Debt on Feb. 1, 2009 was $10,632,005,246,736
The National Debt on Sept 1,2009 over
$11,750,000,000,000
Over 1 trillion 100 billion dollar increase
in 7 months
Unfunded obligations now
exceed $70 trillion.
bankrupt and dying.
Not just
financially in this sea of red ink but morally as well.
And to the republic for
which it once stood.
Has our
sovereignty been signed away?
(Read Article 6 paragraph 2 of Your Constitution)
Injustice,
greed, lies, debauchery.
Over 30,000,000
laws.
How many are pay-offs to
special interest groups?
Unfortunately
when laws are not enforced equally on all people
justice becomes a joke.
We are over our heads in a
serious pile of Crap
Most people when left to their basic
instincts are greedy and the only way to stop that in a capitalistic society is
to tax those who refuse to share. Is there anybody really worth a billion
dollars a year? Is there anyone worth 100 million dollars a year? Is there
anyone worth 10 million dollars a year? NO,
NO, and NO.
I found long ago that everyone is expendable
and replaceable, graveyards the world over are filled with irreplaceable and
unexpendable individuals.
I have yet to meet anyone worth $250,000 a
year, so a simple solution would be for society to cap what individuals can
earn and anything above the cap (say $1 million a year) would be taxed at 100%.
Because nobody wants to be taxed at 100%,
those people, instead of giving their money to the government would use their
excess wages to build factories and hire others; right now the only incentive
the greedy people have is to exploit others to maximize profits.
Being taxed at 100% of wages after $1,000,000
gives them (the greedy people and Special Interest Groups) incentive to invest
in the future of America.
19,980 people
could have $50,000 a year jobs if just 1 person who made a billion dollars was
capped at a $1 million wage package. (The greed of HMO, Hedge Funds, Insurance
and Bank Executives and Lawyers, Lobbyists just to name a few, is destroying
the American dream.)
Is this going to upset those who have
manipulated Congress and the financial systems for their own greedy gain? YES;
but it would be better than the blood that could roll down the streets as
happened when the financial systems were manipulated prior to World War II. (By
the same groups that are manipulating the system today one might add.)
Editor: scaryreality.com
Wall
Street's next big cash cow:
life-insurance
policies?
The
New York Times
By
Jenny Anderson
September
6, 2009
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,
such as 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 lose money.
Either way, Wall Street would profit by
pocketing sizable fees for creating the bonds, reselling them and subsequently
trading them. But some who have studied life settlements warn that insurers
might have to raise premiums in the short term if they end up having to pay out
more death claims than anticipated.
The idea is in the planning stages. But
already "our phones have been ringing off the hook with inquiries,"
says Kathleen Tillwitz, a senior vice president at DBRS, which gives risk
ratings to investments and is reviewing nine proposals for life-insurance
securitizations from private investors and financial firms, including Credit
Suisse.
In the aftermath of the financial meltdown,
exotic investments dreamed up by Wall Street got much of the blame. It was not
just subprime-mortgage securities but an array of products — credit-default
swaps, structured-investment vehicles, collateralized debt obligations — that
proved far riskier than anticipated.
The debacle gave financial wizardry a bad
name everywhere else, but not on Wall Street. Even as the federal government
debates increased financial regulation, bankers are scurrying to concoct new
products.
In addition to securitizing life settlements,
for example, some banks are repackaging their money-losing securities into
higher-rated ones, called re-remics (re-securitization of real-estate
mortgage-investment conduits). Morgan Stanley says at least $30 billion in
residential re-remics have been done this year.
Financial innovation can be good by lowering
the cost of borrowing for everyone, giving consumers more investment choices
and, more broadly, by helping the economy to grow. The proponents of
securitizing life settlements say it would benefit people who want to cash out
their policies while they are alive.
But some are dismayed by Wall Street's quick
return to its old ways, chasing profits with complicated new products.
“It's bittersweet," said James Cox, a
professor of corporate and securities law at Duke University. "The sweet
part is, there are investors interested in exotic products created by
underwriters who make large fees and rating agencies who then get paid to confer
ratings. The bitter part is, it's a return to the good old days."
Indeed, what is good for Wall Street could be
bad for the insurance industry, and perhaps for customers, too. That is because
policyholders often let their life insurance lapse before they die, for a
variety of reasons: their children grow up and no longer need the financial
protection or the premiums become too expensive. When that happens, the insurer
does not have to make a payout.
But if a policy is purchased and packaged
into a security, investors will keep paying the premiums that might have been
abandoned; as a result, more policies will stay in force, ensuring more payouts
over time and less money for the insurance companies.
"When they set their premiums, they were
basing them on assumptions that were wrong," said Neil Doherty, a
professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School who has studied
life settlements.
Doherty said that in reaction to widespread
securitization, insurers likely would have to raise the premiums on new life
policies.
Critics of life settlements believe
"this defeats the idea of what life insurance is supposed to be,"
said Steven Weisbart, senior vice president and chief economist for the
Insurance Information Institute, a trade group. "It's not an investment
product, a gambling product."
Healthy people not wanted
Undeterred, Wall Street is racing ahead for a
simple reason: With $26 trillion of life-insurance policies in force in the
United States, the market could be huge.
Not all policyholders would be interested in
selling their policies. And investors are not interested in healthy people's
policies because they would have to pay those premiums for too long, reducing
profits on the investment.
But even if a small fraction of policyholders
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
U.S. residential mortgage-securities market.
Some financial firms are moving to outpace
their rivals. Credit Suisse, for example, is building a financial-assembly line
to buy large numbers of life-insurance policies, package and resell them, just
as Wall Street firms did with subprime securities.
The bank bought a company that originates
life settlements, and it has set up a group dedicated to structuring deals and
one to sell the products.
Goldman Sachs has developed a tradable index
of life settlements, enabling investors to bet on whether people will live longer
than expected or die sooner than planned. The index is similar to tradable
stock-market indexes that allow investors to bet on the overall direction of
the market without buying stocks.
Spokesmen for Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs
declined to comment.
Public service?
If Wall Street succeeds in securitizing
life-insurance policies, it would take a controversial business — the buying
and selling of policies — that has been around on a smaller scale for a couple
of decades and potentially increase it drastically.
Defenders of life settlements argue that
creating a market to allow the ill or elderly to sell their policies for cash
is a public service. Insurance companies, they note, offer only a "cash
surrender value," typically at a small fraction of the death benefit, when
a policyholder wants to cash out, even after paying large premiums for many
years.
Enter life-settlement companies. Depending on
various factors, they will pay 20 to 200 percent more than the surrender value
an insurer would pay.
Fraud potential
But the industry has been plagued by fraud
complaints. State insurance regulators have criticized life-settlement brokers
for coercing the ill and elderly to take out policies with the sole purpose of
selling them back to the brokers.
In 2006, while he was New York attorney
general, Eliot Spitzer sued Coventry, one of the largest life-settlement
companies, accusing it of engaging in bid-rigging with rivals to keep down
prices offered to people who wanted to sell their policies. The case is continuing.
"Predators in the life-settlement market
have the motive, means and, if left unchecked by legislators and regulators and
by their own community, the opportunity to take advantage of seniors,"
Stephan Leimberg, co-author of a book on life settlements, testified at a
Senate Special Committee on Aging last April.
In
addition to fraud, there is another potential risk for investors: Some people
could live far longer than expected.
It is not just a hypothetical risk. That is
what happened in the 1980s, when new treatments prolonged the life of AIDS
patients.
Investors who bought their policies on the
expectation that most victims would die within two years ended up losing money.
It happened again last fall when companies
that calculate life expectancy determined that people were living longer.
The challenge for Wall Street is to make
securitized life-insurance policies more predictable — and, ideally, safer —
investments.
Despite the mortgage debacle, investors like
Andrew Terrell are intrigued.
Terrell was the co-head of Bear Stearns'
longevity-and-mortality desk — which traded unrated portfolios of life
settlements — and later worked at Goldman Sachs' Institutional Life Cos., a
venture that was introducing a trading platform for life settlements. He thinks
securitized-life policies have big potential.
"It's an interesting asset class because
it's less correlated to the rest of the market than other asset classes,"
Terrell said.
Some academics who have studied
life-settlement securitization agree it is a good idea. One difference, they
concur, is that death is not correlated to the rise and fall of stocks.
"These assets do not have risks that are
difficult to estimate, and they are not, for the most part, exposed to broader
economic risks," said Joshua Coval, a professor of finance at the Harvard
Business School.
The insurance industry is girding for a
fight. "Just as all mortgage providers have been tarred by subprime
mortgages, so too is the concern that all life-insurance companies would be
tarred with the brush of subprime life-insurance settlements," said
Michael Lovendusky, vice president and associate general counsel of the
American Council of Life Insurers, a trade group that represents life-insurance
companies.