A False Alarm

Felix Salmon posits that this morning's NY Time article about securitizing life insurance the way subprime mortgages were bundled together and traded is actually much ado about nothing.

The NYT has an excellent article on the life settlement industry, explaining its pros and cons in a balanced and clear-eyed manner. If you’re interested in such things, you should read it: it was written by Charles Duhigg, and published in December 2006. He mentioned that Wall Street was getting interested in such things:

Trading in life insurance policies held by wealthy seniors has quietly become a big business. Hedge funds, financial institutions like Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank, and investors like Warren E. Buffett are spending billions to buy life insurance policies from the elderly…

This nascent market illustrates one way that investors are hoping to make money from a large and wealthy generation of Americans as they reach retirement age.

Today, Jenny Anderson covers most of the same ground but adds little in the way of actual news. What she does add is a much more ominous tone:

Wall Street is racing ahead for a simple reason: With $26 trillion of life insurance policies in force in the United States, the market could be huge…

If a small fraction of policy holders do sell them, some in the industry predict the market could reach $500 billion…

Some financial firms are moving to outpace their rivals. Credit Suisse, for example, is in effect building a financial assembly line to buy large numbers of life insurance policies, package and resell them — just as Wall Street firms did with subprime securities.

If Wall Street is really “racing ahead”, it’s been doing so for well over a decade now, and doesn’t seem to have got very far. There have been people on Wall Street trying to securitize and trade life settlements for as long as I can remember, and nothing much ever seems to happen. Is anything different now? Not really: Anderson has managed to find exactly one securitization of life settlements, and even that one she only mentions in passing:

Standard & Poor’s, which rated a similar deal called Dignity Partners in the 1990s, declined to comment on its plans.

In fact, Dignity Partners launched in March 1995, and was the grand total of $35 million in size. “Could” the market “reach $500 billion”, as “some in the industry predict”? Well, anything’s possible. But so far it’s managed to go from $35 million to zero over the course of the past 14 years. Wake me up when something happens: for the time being there’s nothing at all.

None of the big three ratings agencies is involved right now: the closest thing to a news hook in Anderson’s story is that DBRS, which she describes as “a little known rating agency in lower Manhattan”, is thinking about applying ratings to these things. Is there any evidence that investors are going to trust DBRS on this one, in the event that anything gets off the ground? No.

The real problem is still regulating the existing derivatives market, still orbiting in the hundreds of trillions of dollars category, far outpacing anything here. Salmon is right: for once, the financial sector's seemingly evil ways mean squat, there's no way for the financials to make money off of trading insurance when the actuarial nerds over at the actual insurance companies are already squeezing out a much profit as possible for the numbers. Insurance is supposed to be low risk and stable for a reason, there's just not any way to leverage something like this into a highly speculative market when the entire industry is built on predictability. The banks aren't going to outsmart the insurance companies here, if there was billions of dollars to be made off a market like this, the insurance companies would already be doing it. The banks have been trying to do so for decades now, and with no luck.