I wasn’t planning to write about this weekend’s New York Times article about the securitization of life settlements after reading Felix Salmon’s post saying there was no new news there. But I was thinking about it some more and thought it was an interesting concept, whether or not it gets off the ground.
Life settlements already exist. The idea is that someone has a whole life insurance policy with a death benefit of, say, $1 million. The insured bought it when he was 35 and had two kids; now he’s 70, the kids are working on Wall Street and don’t need the death benefit, but they’ve cut him off and he needs some cash to fill the prescription drug donut hole and pay his Medicare co-pays. The insurance company will give him a cash settlement value of, say, $100,000. I don’t know what this actual number is, but the key point is that it is less than $1 million at the insured’s expected date of death, discounted back to the present (let’s call that the current actuarial value of the policy). In a life settlement, an investor pays the insured a lump sum that is greater than $100,000 – say, $200,000 – and makes the premium payments (if any are left to be made) on his behalf; in return, the investor becomes the beneficiary on the policy. Again, this already happens, although there are concerns about churning, misrepresentation, the whole deal.
The Problem with Securitization
The New York Times has a story on “Paralysis in the Debt Markets” which says, basically, that credit has dried up because of lack of demand for asset-backed securities. In English, that means that since no one wants to invest in securities that are made out of home mortgages, the people who originate mortgages have no place to sell the mortgages to, so they don’t have any money to lend. And this is also true of commercial real estate, student loans, and so on. For example, “A once-thriving private market in securities backed by home mortgages has collapsed, from $744 billion in 2005, at the peak of the housing boom, to $8 billion during the first half of this year.”
The response of the Fed has been to prop up the securitization market by buying the stuff itself when no one else will buy it. But that program is reaching its provisional limit — according to the times, the Fed has bought $905 billion out of a budget $1.25 trillion in securities — and with the Fed hawks on the warpath, it is likely to be pulled before the private market recovers.
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