After the mortgage business imploded last year, Wall Street investment banks began searching for another big idea to make money. They think they may have found one.
The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they 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.
Pandit, who took Citi's reins in December, said Friday he expects to shed $400 billion of assets he inherited within the next three years. Two-thirds of the divestitures will come from the company's troubled consumer banking division.
If Citi were $400 billion thinner today, it would have about $1.79 trillion of assets, just ahead of Bank of America Corp. (BAC), which cracked the scales with $1.74 trillion of assets at the end of its first quarter on March 31. When Bank of America completes its planned acquisition of Countywide Financial Corp. (CFC) later this year, it would surpass Citigroup, even with Countrywide's rapidly deteriorating mortgage assets.
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