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September 14, 2009 at 08:00 PM
The life settlement market is not about Wall Street, an industry group says.
The life settlement market “is, rather, about providing older Americans with the opportunity to profit from an asset for which they have bought and paid,” Doug Head, executive director of the Life Insurance Settlement Association, Orlando, Fla., writes in a letter to the editors of the New York Times.
Head was reacting to a recent life policy securitization article by Times reporter Jenny Anderson.
Anderson reported that investment banks such as Credit Suisse Group, New York, are bundling life insurance policies into bond-like investments in an effort to spread risk and attract institutional buyers and other investors. The gist of the article was that the packaging of life insurance policies for investors resembles the strategy investment banks used to bundle mortgage-backed securities, before the real estate market crashed.
