Wealth Awakening
You Think You're Saving Money, But You're the Product: The Trillion-Dollar Scam Behind Consumer Installments
You think grabbing that "Buy Now, Pay Later" deal on Shopee or Uber Eats scored you a NT$50 discount? The truth: you are not the consumer — you are the product packaged and sold into Wall Street ABS bonds. Using a simple role-play, this article breaks down how a NT$10 billion pile of consumer IOUs gets sliced into a three-layer tiramisu of bonds and, via bankruptcy remoteness, sold to the world; then it dissects how a Chinese payments giant spun NT$3 billion of equity into NT$300 billion of assets — 100x leverage — before regulators slammed the brakes 48 hours before its IPO.