The ‘securitization of mortgages – bundling mortgage policies and selling them on to investors – is considered to be one of the major reasons for last year’s financial collapse. Now, Wall Street banks want to do it all again – but this time, with life insurance policies instead of real estate. The New York Times reports that large investment banks are lining up to begin securitizing ‘life settlements, life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell so that they can get cash before they die. According to the Times: [Banks] plan to ‘securitize these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die. The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return – though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money. Life settlement companies – companies that buy life insurance policies and cash in when the original policy holder dies – have been around for some time, but this would […]
Urban planners of the 1920s just knew that average Americans and Europeans would abandon their homes and yards for sleek, efficient high-rise apartment towers with shared gardens. In the 1960s, set designers on the TV series ‘Batman” envisioned a computer so powerful that its blinking lights covered half the Batcave. And now, administrators at Cushing Academy in Ashburnham are getting rid of the 144-year-old prep school’s books and are embracing a digital future. A library with 20,000 books will give way to a $500,000 ‘learning center” outfitted with digital readers, laptop study carrels, flat-panel TVs, and even a sophisticated coffee shop. ‘When I look at books,” the school’s headmaster told a Globe reporter, ‘I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books.” Maybe. It’s obvious, at least in the world of periodicals, that electronic screens are rapidly assuming a role once played by printed paper alone. But the long-term shape of the Internet-era news and publishing industries has yet to be settled, and the precise route that progress takes is hard to predict. In the 1980s, plenty of forward-thinking schools got stuck with Betamaxes, or with computer labs full of TRS-80s and Commodore 64s. For some reason, […]
BAGHDAD — The main book market, in Baghdad’s Mutanabi Street, was a hive of angry chatter this week. Bespectacled traders, complaining about new censorship laws, shouted, ‘This is not freedom of expression, and talked of holding a demonstration like one last month, when journalists protested against new restrictions. But would the booksellers dare? They said they were already worried that plainclothes policemen had been taking their names. Perhaps they should go instead to court and fight censorship with the help of lawyers. ‘Not a chance, said one book-dealer. ‘This is the new Iraq. Legal protections, he noted, count for little. ‘Power, he added, ‘is held by the men with the guns. He had a point. The Shia-led government has overseen a ballooning of the country’s security apparatus. Human-rights violations are becoming more common. In private many Iraqis, especially educated ones, are asking if their country may go back to being a police state. Old habits from Saddam Hussein’s era are becoming familiar again. Torture is routine in government detention centres. ‘Things are bad and getting worse, even by regional standards, says Samer Muscati, who works for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based lobby. His outfit reports that, […]
GLENROCK, Wyo. – Richard Grant Jr.’s family has ranched Wyoming’s rugged granite-and-grass hills for generations, their 123-year-old ranch dotted with reminders of their long history – an historic schoolhouse, an old red barn and the parcels of land sold away during hard times. But it wasn’t until a few years ago that a radical prospect blew in with the stiff winds that sweep the ridge tops of the northern Laramie Range: wind turbines. Grant welcomes the chance to get into wind energy development and generate some income. His courting of wind developers however has put him at odds with some of his neighbors, who consider a large-scale wind farm to be the industrialization of their backyards in the sparsely populated region. ‘My goal is to stay in ag, be able to pass on our generations of history,’ Grant said. ‘This gives us that opportunity.’ As the nation’s demand for renewable energy grows, landowners and governments across the West are wrestling with how to balance their cherished private property rights against the far-reaching visual impact of 400-foot-tall wind turbines and the transmission lines needed to move power to distant cities. ‘That’s something you’re hearing a lot […]
It is a sobering time for the world’s most fragile countries-virulent economic crisis, countless natural disasters, and government collapse. This year, we delve deeper than ever into just what went wrong-and who is to blame. Yemen may not yet be front-page news, but it’s being watched intently these days in capitals worldwide. A perfect storm of state failure is now brewing there: disappearing oil and water reserves; a mob of migrants, some allegedly with al Qaeda ties, flooding in from Somalia, the failed state next door; and a weak government increasingly unable to keep things running. Many worry Yemen is the next Afghanistan: a global problem wrapped in a failed state. It’s not just Yemen. The financial crisis was a near-death experience for insurgency-plagued Pakistan, which remains on imf life support. Cameroon has been rocked by economic contagion, which sparked riots, violence, and instability. Other countries dependent on the import and export of commodities-from Nigeria to Equatorial Guinea to Bangladesh-had a similarly rough go of it last year, suffering what economist Homi Kharas calls a ‘whiplash effect as prices spiked sharply and then plummeted. All indications are that 2009 will bring little to no reprieve. Instead, the […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
