Thursday, March 11, 2010

billion dollar deathbed investing

This will blow your mind.  AIG, Bank of America, GE and other corporate giants sell bonds with a provision that allow investors to redeem a bond at face value if one of the investors dies.  Guess what our financial genius' started doing?

With prices as low as 50 cents to a dollar, investors are pairing up with terminally ill people to scoop up bonds at bargain prices, and holding on to them until the ill partner passes away.   Returns of up to 200-300% are common.  About $83 billion in outstanding bonds are being held with this "survivor" option, which was originally installed to encourage elderly people to invest in the market without fear of losing their money if they died. 

Just another short-term manipulation of our markets that will probably have a worse effect on the overall economy than these people thought when they started abusing the system.  When will we learn our lesson with all this nonsense?  Not to mention, how informed are these terminally ill people about what is going on? Hopefully they got/are getting their cut.

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