Jean Eaglesham

speaker
123 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2018 last heard Oct 2024

Jean Eaglesham’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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WSJ Your Money Briefing · Investors Lose Millions From a Felon in a Strip Mall · 24 Jul 2018 podcast
They made it sound very impressive.
Actually, it's a tiny operation, and yet it's created these outsized losses.
Sure.
This company was operating in a pretty obscure corner of the private markets.
And what it was doing, these things are called pension advances.
So they essentially found retired workers and said, we'll give you a loan against your benefits.
So say you'd say, OK, I'll pay you, say, $450 for my benefits every year for five years.
And in return, they get a loan for just a fraction of that amount.
And the states have said, actually, the percentage rates here will be 100%, 200%, well in excess of what are meant to be the limits on loans.
Exactly.
So they bought the pensions that way.
And then they sold them on to investors and said to investors, OK, you give us a lump sum, we'll give you a fixed income, say 7% for five years.
And that was supposedly paid by these people's pensions.
So it was presented as a safe investment, and we found investors who really didn't have that much money, and they were persuaded by advisors to trust their own retirement savings to supposedly get this fixed income.
Certainly a lot of them, yeah, it was retired workers, people who, you know, didn't have that much money, but it was presented, as I say, as being a safe fixed income, an alternative to the stock market.
And unfortunately, it was all being controlled by this tiny firm.
Because it's private markets, there aren't the same rules and oversight that one gets with the public stock markets and bonds.
And what's happened now is this company out of the strip mall appears to be no longer operating.
Certainly it's not answering its phones.
It's not clear where Scott Cohn, the felon who ran the company, actually is.
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