Disclaimer & Systemic Critique
The Global Instability Yield Note is not a real investment product. It is a satirical artifact designed to expose how existing financial market structures already monetize human suffering—just without saying so directly.
GIYN exists to make visible what is already true: the global financial system has built sophisticated instruments to profit from war, displacement, hunger, and collapse. These instruments are not illegal. They are not hidden. They are simply distributed across enough products, with enough euphemistic naming, that we rarely see them for what they are.
This project consolidates those mechanics into a single, honestly-named structure. The discomfort you feel reading this prospectus is not because GIYN is impossible—it's because GIYN is barely fiction.
"The uncomfortable truth is not that this product could exist. The uncomfortable truth is that everything in it already does exist—it's just sold in polite pieces."
Every component of GIYN has a real-world analog. Here is a partial inventory of how modern finance already prices instability:
Defense & Aerospace ETFs
Funds like ITA, XAR, and PPA allow retail investors to gain exposure to companies whose revenues increase during periods of military conflict. The prospectuses don't say "profit from war"—they say "capitalize on increased defense spending."
The euphemism: "Defense sector momentum exposure"
Sovereign Credit Default Swaps
Major banks maintain active desks that allow investors to bet on sovereign debt distress. When a country approaches default due to war, sanctions, or political collapse, CDS spreads widen—and holders profit. This is legal, liquid, and normalized.
The euphemism: "Sovereign risk hedging"
Volatility Harvesting Products
VIX-linked products, variance swaps, and volatility ETFs allow investors to profit when markets panic. Panic is often caused by geopolitical shocks, terrorist attacks, or outbreak of hostilities. The products don't discriminate by cause—they simply monetize fear.
The euphemism: "Volatility premium capture"
Commodity Shock Derivatives
Energy futures, grain futures, and fertilizer contracts allow sophisticated traders to profit from supply disruptions. When a war closes a shipping corridor, when sanctions cut off a major producer, when infrastructure is destroyed—commodity prices spike and derivatives pay out.
The euphemism: "Supply chain risk management"
Disaster-Recovery REITs & Infrastructure Funds
Real estate investment trusts and infrastructure funds often hold positions in companies that provide temporary housing, emergency logistics, and reconstruction services. Their revenues increase after disasters—natural or man-made.
The euphemism: "Resilience infrastructure investment"
Sanctions-Arbitrage Currency Strategies
When sanctions fragment global currency systems, spreads emerge between official and parallel exchange rates. Sophisticated funds exploit these spreads—effectively profiting from the economic isolation of populations.
The euphemism: "Emerging market FX alpha"
None of these products are illegal. None are hidden. They are simply not marketed with honesty about what they actually do. GIYN is what happens when you remove the euphemisms.
Financialization as Moral Laundering
Modern finance has developed a sophisticated apparatus for moral laundering—the process by which ethically questionable activities are packaged into instruments that appear neutral, technical, and respectable.
Consider the structure: A pension fund cannot say "we're betting on war." But a pension fund can absolutely say "we're adding defense sector exposure for diversification purposes." The economic reality is identical. The moral framing is completely different.
This is not a conspiracy. It's worse: it's emergent. No single actor designed a system to profit from human suffering. But the system, through thousands of rational individual decisions, evolved to do exactly that—while developing language sophisticated enough to obscure what it was doing.
The key insight: The financial system has not failed to price human suffering. It has priced human suffering with remarkable efficiency. It simply doesn't call it that.
The Abstraction Problem
Financial instruments create layers of abstraction that disconnect investors from consequences. Consider the chain:
You buy a diversified ETF →
Which holds a defense contractor →
Which sells missiles to a government →
Which uses them in a conflict →
Which displaces a population →
Which drives up your REIT returns because temporary housing demand increased
At each step, the connection becomes more abstract. By the time quarterly returns arrive, the relationship between your portfolio and the displaced population is invisible. The abstraction isn't accidental—it's the product.
The Incentive Trap
The most troubling implication is structural: if significant capital is deployed in instruments that profit from instability, then powerful financial actors have incentives to prefer instability to peace.
This doesn't mean Goldman Sachs is starting wars. But it does mean that when policy debates occur about intervention, sanctions, or escalation, the universe of actors with financial interests in continued instability is larger than most people realize—and their interests are systematically represented in policy discussions.
GIYN makes this explicit with its "Peace Probability Discount"—the formal acknowledgment that peace reduces returns. This feels monstrous when written plainly. But it is simply an honest description of how existing volatility products already function.
The 2008 Echo
GIYN's synthetic extensions (GIYN², GIYN³) deliberately echo the CDO-squared structures that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis. The parallel is intentional.
In 2008, financial engineers created instruments that allowed infinite synthetic exposure to mortgages—eventually exceeding the total value of actual mortgages by multiples. When the underlying reality (housing prices) diverged from the synthetic exposure, the system collapsed.
The same structural risk exists when synthetic instruments are built on top of instability. If enough capital is deployed betting on conflict continuation, powerful actors develop interests in preventing resolution—not because they're evil, but because they're rational actors responding to incentives the system created.
"GIYN³ allows exposure to the expectation of future instability, decoupling returns entirely from whether conflict actually occurs. Returns are generated from the spread between implied instability and realized instability, allowing investors to profit from fear itself—regardless of whether feared events materialize."
This is satire. It is also a precise description of how volatility derivatives already work.
GIYN is designed to provoke uncomfortable questions:
Should financial instruments be permitted to create concentrated incentives for instability?
What are the systemic risks when significant capital profits from disorder?
How does the abstraction of financial instruments affect moral reasoning?
If every component of GIYN already exists, what exactly makes GIYN unacceptable?
Is the problem GIYN's honesty, or existing products' euphemism?
Who benefits from keeping these mechanics distributed and unnamed?
What would markets look like if all instruments were named as honestly as GIYN?
Does ESG investing address these issues, or does it simply add another layer of moral laundering?
To be absolutely clear:
This is not an investment product. No securities are being offered. No money can be invested in GIYN.
This is not investment advice. Nothing here should be construed as a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security.
This is not a prediction. The "performance metrics" are fictional numbers designed for satirical effect.
This is not a call to action. We are not advocating for or against any particular financial regulation.
This is a mirror. We built a product that looks like what Wall Street already sells—just without the euphemisms. The discomfort is the point.
"Instability isn't a black swan anymore. It's the water we're swimming in."
The Global Instability Yield Note doesn't create the reality it describes. That reality already exists. What GIYN does is name it—clearly, directly, and without the comfortable abstraction that lets us pretend we don't know what we're doing.
If the product feels monstrous, ask yourself: is the monstrosity in the naming, or in the system that made the naming accurate?
For those interested in the real-world systems this satire references:
The Big Short
Michael Lewis
On CDO structures and synthetic replication
Flash Boys
Michael Lewis
On market structure abstraction
The Code of Capital
Katharina Pistor
On how law creates financial instruments
Crashed
Adam Tooze
On systemic financial risk
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Thomas Piketty
On wealth concentration dynamics
Bullshit Jobs
David Graeber
On financialization of the economy