by Structured Settlement Watchdog
SMA Hub has now admitted in writing that what it calls secondary market annuities are really derivatives. In referring to it as an "industry standard", SMA Hub has thrown the tertiary market and those feeding off of it under the proverbial bus.
What SMA Hub Said Less Than a Year Ago
When the original owners of payment streams sell their future payments for cash today, a secondary market annuity is created. Furthermore, it is simply an existing payment stream, transacting in the secondary marked [ source Wayback Archive screenshot 10/25/2016]
What SMA Hub Says Now
When the original owners of payment streams sell their future payments for cash today, a secondary market annuity derivative is created { SMA HUB website retrieved September 26, 2017]
SMA also now says "The payment stream is an existing, fixed receivable or derivative".
In my opinion, SMA Hub statements support a claim that certain intermediaries may have falsely promote derivatives as annuities to investors. Now that certain events unsettling to investors have occurred the claims may be coming home to roost.
SMA Hub claims that secondary market annuities "are an industry standard". What industry?
- A secondary market annuity is not an annuity.
- A standard that uses a scam label is no standard.
- A standard that uses the cachet of a legitimate insurance product to mask what is now admitted as a derivative so it sells well with investors is no standard.
It is time SMA Hub, Annuity Straight Talk and others, including settlement planners (you know who you are), who continue to use the scam label in light of recent unsettling events, to stop doing it if you truly value what the tertiary market offers.
Is a Morass of Front Page Worthy Litigation Inevitable?
Given the nature and substance of recent court filings, I predict that in the next 12 months there will be litigation that pits owners of structured settlement derivatives sold as annuities to injured parties, to personal injury lawyers and judges reviewing infant settlement as annuities, who have had payments suspended, lost money, and/or had to spend legal fees to assert their rights acquired in structured settlement transfers that they thought were safe, against structured settlement annuitants, the validity of whose structured settlement transfers have come into question due to a fraud.
Comments and Trackback Policy