Selling Death: Wall Street’s Newest Bubble

When Wall Street’s commodities bubble crashed last year, I asked whether the next bubble might be in securitized body parts. Wall Street would search the world for transplantable organs, holding them in cold storage as collateral against securities sold to managed money such as pension funds. Of course, it was meant to be an apocryphal story about unregulated banksters gone wild. But as the NYT reports, Wall Street really is moving forward to market bets on death. The banksters would purchase life insurance policies, pool and tranch them, and sell securities that allow money managers to bet that the underlying “collateral” (human beings) will die an untimely death. You can’t make this stuff up.

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