Banking on Death

Careful there older person with a life insurance policy, Wall Street has a plan to cash in our your death. Bankers are buying life insurance policies from the very old and the very ill for a percentage of the policy’s worth. If your policy is worth $500,000 when you die, they might give you $250,000 now and wait for the payoff. In the meantime, they’ll bundle thousands of policies into bond offerings and sell them to pension funds and brokers. Everybody waits for everybody to die and they snag the profits from your demise, which they hope will come sooner rather than later for obvious reasons. Talk about your Sarah Palin death panels. There are $26 trillion in life insurance policies in force in the US alone so if bankers can get a few trillion into this game of chicken, it could be another winner/loser. Just after they buy up all the policies of the walking dead, someone finds a cure for everything along with the fountain of youth and we’ve got the subprime dying time disaster. Sweet, and you’ve got some of their money. Now, watch for the puddle.


Satin Smooth Brand Won’t Save You

Misleading packaging can lead some smokers to believe there are brands that are safer according to a University of Nottingham study. Researchers recommend plain packaging as a way not to mislead smokers. Manufacturers argue that plain packaging would deprive customers of the right to differentiate between brands that will kill you today or brands that will kill you tomorrow or the next day.

Stone Age Cat People

Cat people have been around a long time. Archaeologists have just found a grave dating back 9,500 years containing the remains of a cat and a spinster.