Our financial system is crumbling this week.

[cardsfantx]

The guy is a scumbag...hope you're not suggesting it's a good thing that he did

[AdmiralKird]

It's great when arrogant insurance companies get screwed by someone smarter then them.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb ... 29990.html

This guy is screwing the terminally ill worse than the financial companies. Financial companies have what are called viaticals for this type of practice. The difference is viaticals benefit the terminally ill the longer they live, this guys does not.

In a nutshell:
He had his salesmen go out and find people who were sick, gave them $2,000 for their consent and personal information, then was able to invest with a safety net where if the stocks fell below the amount of interest earned, he would recoup that and the money he gave them for their consent from the financial companies.

If the financial companies were to sell these same people a viatical, the contract would be much the same but there would be no investor safety net, and the terminally ill would receive more from the 'investor.' The sick would receive regular payments from an investor up until the day they died. The amount the investor earned was the difference between the present value of the life insurance payout, and the present value of the total sum of all the payouts the investor gave to the sick person for the contract during each period they had not yet died. The sooner they died, the more the investor would receive from the life insurance policy, the longer the sick person lived, they more money they would have to pay out to the sick.

The guy was really screwing over the sick for the amount of money they should have received for entering into these kinds of contracts. He is a scumbag.

[pioneer98]

I'm not saying he's not a scumbag. He is a giant scumbag.

The money he screwed out of these dying people? Yeah, the insurance companies are suing to get that from him. That makes them gianter scumbags.

[AdmiralKird]

I'm not saying he's not a scumbag. He is a giant scumbag.

The money he screwed out of these dying people? Yeah, the insurance companies are suing to get that from him. That makes them gianter scumbags.

The money isn't flowing like that. The guy is claiming this is what is in the contract:

Code: Select all

Dying Person <--- Scumbag   <- Insurance Companies
                     |
                     \/
               Investments--> Other Investors

This is how the Insurance Companies are claiming it should be:

Code: Select all

Dying Person <--- Scumbag
                     |
                     \/
               Investments--> Other Investors

This is how a viatical normally works when it favors the investor:

Code: Select all

Dying Person <<----Insurance Company <<<---Investor
                      |__________________/\/\/\/\/\

When it favors the Insurance Company/Dying Person:

Code: Select all

Dying Person <<<<----Insurance Company <<<<<<<<<<<---Investor
                         |__________________________/\/\/\/\/\

I don't know why you're calling the Insurance companies larger scumbags. For all intents and purposes, in their contracts they bet against the terminally ill dying soon, and would give them more money if they did not, whereas this guy gave them a fixed amount and he stood to benefit the longer they lived, but wasn't going to give the person any additional money, and if his investments failed the insurance company would reimburse him. They're not suing him to take what the dying people got, they're suing to not pay out the insurance benefit to his side.

[pioneer98]

The insurance companies only gave out these contracts because they got too greedy. They either completely missed the fine print on the application that they themselves wrote (which I find unbelievable), or they were 100% aware of what the guy was doing and chose to ignore it at that time. The right time to ask questions was before they approved the contracts. So to me, the insurance companies are complicit in this mess. So maybe their level of scumbaggery is pretty much equal to the guy that screwed them.

It's kind of like what we saw with the crazy mortgages before the housing meltdown - do you blame the person making $25K for taking out a $300,000 adjustable rate mortgage? Or do you blame the bank for awarding a crazy mortgage like that? To me, they both share the blame.

[New Pagodi]

By 10am it emerged that Mr Perkins had single-handedly moved the global price of oil to an eight-month high during a "drunken blackout".

[pioneer98]

Citigroup's CEO suddenly resigned today. He got paid $261M over the last 5 years. This is how the stock performed during that time:

[SHOW]

[sighyoung]

Citigroup's CEO suddenly resigned today. He got paid $261M over the last 5 years. This is how the stock performed during that time:

[SHOW]

Hey, the stock price more than doubled in the last three years!

[greenback44]

I'm not interested in defending Vikram Pandit, but that graph doesn't say anything about the job he did. Rather, it says Citigroup's stock price was obscenely inflated in 2007. It's probably still inflated today.

[lukethedrifter]

slide already knows this:

Country Club Sopranos: American banks are on a massive crime spree. Obama and Romney hope you won't notice

You wouldn't know it by watching the news or reading the paper, but America's banks are on the largest crime spree the country has ever known. Let's go to the highlight reel, shall we?

In July, Wells Fargo paid a $175 million settlement after the feds caught its brokers systematically pushing minority customers into mortgages with higher rates and fees, even though they posed the same credit risks as whites.


wikimedia commons
Longtime prosecutor and Notre Dame law professor G. Robert Blakey: "The real theft was on Wall Street... All of the people who ran the scams have their big houses and their airplanes and they're laughing."

Monika Golon
"Retired criminal" Sam Antar, who now trains the IRS and FBI how to bust corporate looters: "It's almost like stealing a billion dollars with a pencil is not as bad. You have a lesser chance of going to jail than if you mug somebody on the streets of New York."

One study found that Wells Fargo charged Hispanics $2,000 more in what the U.S. Justice Department called a "racial surtax." The bank docked blacks nearly $3,000 extra for their own improper pigmentation.

But despite a colossal civil-rights fraud perpetrated against 30,000 customers, the settlement amounted to just .011 percent of the San Francisco bank's annual income. It was like forcing a $30,000-a-year working stiff to pay a $240 fine.

Across the country, in Minneapolis, U.S. Bank also swindled its customers, though at least it let whites in on the action. Instead of logging debit-card purchases in the order they were made, the bank rearranged them from highest amount to lowest, the better to artificially stick customers with overdraft fees.

U.S. Bank paid $55 million to settle a class-action suit in July. It was the thirteenth major bank caught running this scam.

Yet these titans of finance were pikers compared to American Express. It promised $300 to anyone who signed up for its Blue Sky card, then decided it would be way better to just stiff them. The company was also caught charging illegal late fees and discriminating against older applicants. The penalty for its sins: $112 million in fines and refunds.

These were just the opening salvos of the assault. Bank of America was caught illegally foreclosing on the homes of active-duty soldiers. Visa and MasterCard were accused of fixing the prices they charged merchants to process credit-card payments. Morgan Stanley colluded to drive up New York electricity prices. And in the most depraved case of all, Morgan Stanley was even sued for allegedly swindling Irish nuns in an investment deal.

If they'd been common robbers, the bankers surely would have faced indictments. After all, their scams have run for years, their breadth and coordination breathtaking.

But not a single boss went to jail. Some firms settled for just a fraction of what they'd stolen. Most have never admitted wrongdoing. And in the ethics-optional land known as Wall Street, many saw their stock prices rise.

http://www.riverfronttimes.com/2012-11- ... um=twitter