The annuity is sold as the closest thing in American finance to a promise that cannot break. A retiree hands an insurer a lump sum, and the insurer agrees to pay a fixed amount for the rest of that person's life. The product exists precisely because its buyer wants to stop worrying about markets. What very few buyers, and a surprising number of professional allocators, ever ask is the only question that matters: what, exactly, stands behind the guarantee?
Over the past fifteen years the answer has changed in a way that almost no one outside the industry has been forced to confront. A large and rapidly growing share of the reserves backing America's life insurance and annuity promises is no longer managed by traditional insurers funding traditional bonds. It is managed by alternative-asset managers who acquired or partnered with life insurers in order to gain control of a stable, long-dated pool of capital—the float—and then redirected that capital into the private and structured credit those same managers originate, while ceding the underlying liabilities to reinsurers domiciled in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. The International Monetary Fund estimates that private-equity-influenced life insurers may already exceed ten percent of total United States life industry assets, and that figure understates the reach of the model because it captures ownership but not the looser web of asset-management mandates and offshore reinsurance treaties that extend it.¹
This is not, in itself, a scandal. The structures are legal, they are rated, and they are supervised. The managers who built them are among the most sophisticated credit investors in the world, and the capital they brought reinvigorated a life sector that publicly traded insurers had spent two decades trying to exit.² The forensic problem is narrower and more durable than any accusation of wrongdoing. It is that the model concentrates three distinct and compounding opacities—valuation uncertainty on assets that do not trade, related-party conflicts on assets the manager itself originated, and regulatory arbitrage on liabilities the cedant's regulator can no longer fully see—inside the one product whose entire value proposition is the certainty of the promise. And it does so at the precise moment that the broader private-credit market is being asked, for the first time in a full cycle, whether its marks are real.
Buxton Helmsley's view is that the disclosures required to answer that question already exist, that they are sitting in statutory filings and reinsurance schedules that almost no allocator reads, and that the institutions exposed to this model—whether as purchasers of the annuity, as limited partners of the manager, or as underwriters of the manager's securities—are not yet demanding them. This article sets out how the machine was built, what now sits inside it, why three documented failures should be read as a warning rather than as a set of isolated frauds, and the specific forensic questions an investor should require answered before extending trust to any insurance balance sheet shaped by an asset manager.
The logic of the model is elegant, and understanding it is the precondition for auditing it. A life insurer that sells a fixed annuity takes in premium today and owes a stream of payments over decades. The spread between what the insurer earns on the assets backing that liability and what it has promised the policyholder is the business. In the long era of near-zero interest rates that followed the global financial crisis, that spread collapsed, the guarantees became ruinously expensive to honor, and traditional, publicly traded life insurers began retreating from the product line entirely.³
Private-capital managers recognized that the liabilities the incumbents were fleeing were, to a credit investor, an extraordinary prize. Annuity reserves are long-dated, predictable, and—under normal conditions—relatively insensitive to short-term redemption, forming a near-permanent base of capital against which an investment manager can earn fees and harvest the illiquidity premium on assets it is uniquely positioned to source. The IMF documents four distinct strategies through which the managers captured this prize: taking a small strategic stake, often below the ten-percent voting threshold at which an acquirer is presumed to control the insurer and must seek regulatory approval, paired with an agreement to manage the insurer's alternatives; the traditional leveraged buyout of a life insurer; full ownership of a life insurer held on the manager's own balance sheet as a strategically central source of funding; and the use of an offshore reinsurer to assume blocks of business from unaffiliated insurers.⁴
The platforms that resulted are now among the largest names in American retirement. Apollo Global Management built Athene, beginning with the assumption of an annuity book from American Equity Investment Life and completing an all-stock merger with the insurer in January 2022; Athene was the largest seller of retail annuities in the United States in 2024.⁵ KKR took majority control of Global Atlantic in 2020—a transaction the IMF reports cost roughly three billion dollars—and acquired the remaining minority interest in early 2024, by which point Global Atlantic's assets had grown to more than one hundred fifty billion dollars from roughly seventy billion at the time of the original deal.⁶ Brookfield acquired American Equity Investment Life; Carlyle owns Fortitude Re; Blackstone built an insurance asset-management franchise spanning Resolution Life and Corebridge; and the roster of asset-manager-and-insurer pairings now extends to Security Benefit, MassMutual, and Kuvare among many others.⁷ The economic engine is the same in every case: the manager earns fee income on a long-dated asset base it would otherwise have to raise fund by fund, and the IMF's reconstruction of KKR's own statements to investors—an estimated forty-eight percent increase in fee-paying assets and more than two hundred million dollars of additional annual fee income from a single insurance transaction—illustrates why the prize was worth pursuing.⁸
United States retail annuity sales reached a record of roughly four hundred thirty-four billion dollars in 2024, and the asset-manager-owned writers captured a disproportionate share of that growth.⁹ The model, in other words, is not a niche. It now sits at the center of how Americans fund retirement, and its expansion shows no sign of slowing.
The second step in the model is the one that matters forensically. Once a manager gains control of an insurer's general account, the composition of the assets backing the guarantee changes—quickly, deliberately, and in a measurable direction. The academic work the IMF relies upon, by Divya Kirti and Natasha Sarin, found that within a year of a private-equity takeover, the acquired insurers cut their holdings of corporate bonds by more than seven percentage points and increased their holdings of privately issued asset-backed securities by more than six percentage points.¹⁰ The general account does not merely grow under new ownership. It migrates out of the liquid, publicly priced instruments a policyholder might imagine and into structured and private credit that does not trade and cannot be independently priced.
The IMF's own data make the magnitude plain: private-equity-influenced life insurers hold a markedly larger share of illiquid assets—structured credit, mortgage loans, and private mortgage-backed securities—than the insurance sector as a whole.¹¹ A central vehicle for this shift is the collateralized loan obligation. United States insurers held roughly two hundred seventy-seven billion dollars of CLOs at the end of 2024, equivalent to about five percent of their total bond holdings, and the concentration among asset-manager-owned insurers is higher still.¹² The forensic significance of the CLO is not that it is inherently dangerous but that it is exquisitely susceptible to capital arbitrage. The NAIC has documented that an insurer owning every tranche of a CLO built from B-rated loans could, under the risk-based-capital rules in force, hold dramatically less capital against that position than against the identical underlying loans held directly—a difference that is an accounting artifact rather than a difference in economic risk.¹³
Regulators have begun, slowly, to close these gaps. The NAIC's principles-based bond definition, adopted in 2023 and effective January 1, 2025, with no grandfathering of existing holdings, forces insurers to reassess whether each structured security is genuinely a bond and to reclassify many instruments in ways that change their capital treatment.¹⁴ Separately, the NAIC raised the interim risk-based-capital factor on the residual—equity-like—tranches of structured securities from thirty percent for year-end 2023 filings to forty-five percent for year-end 2024, an explicit attempt to make the arbitrage less rewarding.¹⁵ These are constructive reforms. They are also, tellingly, a regulatory admission that for years the capital held against the riskiest layers of these portfolios was too low, and they remain incomplete while the deeper modeling work on CLO capital charges proceeds.¹⁶
Layered on top of valuation uncertainty is the conflict that the structure makes structural rather than incidental. When the manager that controls the insurer is also the originator and asset manager of the private credit the insurer buys, the insurer is purchasing assets from a related party, at marks the related party influences, in volumes that generate fees for the related party. The IMF and the NAIC both single out related-party investments, structured securities, and other complex assets as the core of their concern, and the NAIC's Macroprudential Working Group built a list of thirteen regulatory considerations specific to these relationships precisely because the existing framework was not designed to police a world in which the asset manager, the originator, and the insurer are the same economic actor.¹⁷ A life insurer typically holds capital equal to roughly ten percent of its assets.¹⁸ When a meaningful fraction of those assets are illiquid, self-originated, and marked by the affiliate, the quality of that thin layer of capital is only as reliable as marks that no independent market is testing.
The third step exports the question beyond the reach of the regulator who is supposed to answer it.
In recent years the large managers established their own reinsurers, primarily in Bermuda, and used them to assume the liabilities of the onshore insurers they control as well as blocks ceded by unaffiliated companies.¹⁹ The scale of this migration is now extraordinary. Reserves ceded by United States life insurers nearly doubled between 2020 and 2024, from roughly one and three-tenths trillion dollars to about two and four-tenths trillion, and the share moving offshore surged: offshore cessions rose by nearly one hundred fifty percent to more than one and one-tenth trillion dollars, with Bermuda alone accounting for roughly eighty-four percent of all reserves ceded offshore and Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, and Barbados together comprising close to ninety-five percent.²⁰ Bermuda's long-term reinsurance industry managed assets of approximately one and one-half trillion dollars as of September 2025.²¹ Industry analysts estimate that asset-manager-and-private-equity-backed insurers account for a disproportionate share of these offshore transactions, and that insurers ceding more than half of their reserves offshore are typically the ones sponsored by an asset manager.²²
The appeal of Bermuda is not secrecy in any crude sense; it is a valuation regime that produces a more favorable answer. The Bermuda Economic Balance Sheet permits, through what is known as the scenario-based approach, a more generous discount rate on long-dated liabilities, with the effect that the spread earned on illiquid assets can be recognized upfront and booked as capital in a manner that the cedant's home regime would not allow.²³ Because Bermuda's regime has been deemed equivalent to Europe's Solvency II and granted reciprocal-jurisdiction status by the NAIC, the arbitrage is not contraband—it is sanctioned, which is what makes it durable.²⁴ Most of these treaties take the form of modified coinsurance or coinsurance with funds withheld, structures in which the cedant retains the supporting assets on its own balance sheet while the economic risk passes to the reinsurer, which commonly directs those assets through an affiliated manager.²⁵ These are, in the IMF's own characterization, highly complex and less transparent arrangements that can produce accounting windfalls, that demand legal, actuarial, and accounting expertise to unwind even by the supervisors entitled to the information, and that are not transparent to the public through ordinary financial reporting at all.²⁶
The defenders of the model are correct that Bermuda enhanced its regime in 2024 and that the regulator there now reviews long-term reinsurance transactions before they execute.²⁷ But the structural limitation the IMF identified remains: approval occurs transaction by transaction, not in view of the cumulative effect of many treaties over time, and not every cedant's regulator possesses the power, the data, or the actuarial capacity to evaluate what it is approving.²⁸ United States regulators have recognized the gap. The NAIC's Life Actuarial Task Force has been developing asset-adequacy-testing requirements aimed specifically at offshore reinsurance, the Financial Stability Oversight Council has flagged the use of offshore reinsurers affiliated with the ceding company, and in 2025 and 2026 the United States Treasury entered into direct engagement with Bermuda over risk-based capital, private letter ratings, and the oversight of these evolving business models.²⁹ The supervisory machinery is mobilizing. It has not yet caught up.
The objection to all of this is the reasonable one: the structures are legal, the firms are sophisticated, and nothing has broken. That objection is best answered not with theory but with three episodes in which the opacity did fail, each revealing a different fault line that the model holds in common.
The first fault line is liquidity and valuation under stress. In Italy, the mid-sized life insurer Eurovita, owned by a closed-end fund managed by the private-equity firm Cinven, was found by the Italian supervisor to carry a capital shortfall of roughly two hundred fifty million euros. When the owner proved unable to inject the required capital, the regulator removed management, installed an administrator, and froze policyholder redemptions—an intervention that had to be extended repeatedly and ultimately required a rescue assembled from five insurers and twenty-five banks.³⁰ Eurovita is the model's nightmare in miniature: a private-capital-owned insurer whose assets could not be liquidated to meet surrenders when rising rates made surrendering attractive, with policyholders trapped while the structure was unwound.
The second fault line is collateral that does not exist. The 2023 collapse of the insurtech Vesttoo exposed a global web of fraudulent letters of credit—on the order of two billion dollars, including instruments purportedly issued by a major Chinese bank that turned out to be forged—used to collateralize reinsurance written through segregated cells of a Bermuda vehicle.³¹ The reinsurance obligations were, in the structure's own logic, secured entirely by the ability to draw on those letters of credit; when the collateral proved fictitious, the entire edifice was imperiled, Vesttoo filed for bankruptcy in Delaware, and the Bermuda Monetary Authority and the cell platform were drawn into litigation that continues.³² The lesson is not that letters of credit are uniquely flawed. It is that in an offshore structure designed to be opaque to the public, the collateral standing behind a promise can be confirmed by very few people, and what cannot be readily verified can, on occasion, simply fail to be there.
The third and most instructive fault line is the related-party conflict carried to its criminal extreme. Greg Lindberg, the founder of Eli Global and owner of Global Bankers Insurance Group, was sentenced in May 2026 to a combined twelve years in federal prison for a bribery conspiracy and a fraud that prosecutors valued at more than two billion dollars, having siphoned reserves backing his insurance companies into other businesses he owned and controlled through a series of circular transactions, while misleading regulators and rating agencies and forgiving for his own benefit more than one hundred twenty-five million dollars of loans from his affiliated companies.³³ The proceeds, prosecutors said, funded private jets, mansions, and a two-hundred-fourteen-foot yacht.³³ A North Carolina appellate court found that Lindberg had directed roughly one and two-tenths billion dollars of policyholder money into non-insurance companies he owned or controlled; his insurers were placed into rehabilitation in 2019; and a special master recommended in April 2026 that he pay more than one and six-tenths billion dollars in restitution to eight insurance companies, of which the single largest share—roughly eight hundred twenty-one million dollars—is owed to Colorado Bankers Life.³⁴
The detail in the Lindberg matter that should hold an investor's attention is the regulatory lever at its center. The bribery for which Lindberg was separately convicted was an attempt to remove the deputy commissioner responsible for enforcing a rule that capped the share of an insurer's portfolio that could be invested in affiliated entities—a cap the North Carolina commissioner had moved to tighten from forty percent to ten percent.³⁵ The entire scheme turned on the affiliated-investment limit, because the affiliated-investment limit is the single most important defense against precisely the conflict the asset-manager-owned insurance model institutionalizes. Lindberg was a criminal and the major platforms are not; that distinction is real and important. But the structural feature his crime exploited—policyholder reserves flowing into entities the owner also controls, at values the owner influences—is a feature the legitimate model shares, and the law's response to Lindberg is a map of exactly where a forensic analyst should look.
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For most of the past decade, the question of what backs these guarantees could be deferred because credit was benign. In a long expansion, illiquid private loans perform, marks drift gently upward, and the difference between an asset that is genuinely money-good and an asset that is merely marked money-good is invisible. That deferral is ending.
In the autumn of 2025, the bankruptcies of the auto-parts supplier First Brands and the subprime auto lender Tricolor delivered private credit its first real stress of the cycle. First Brands collapsed with more than ten billion dollars of debt and, by the account of its own newly installed directors, as much as two and three-tenths billion dollars of borrowing kept off its balance sheet through factoring and supply-chain-finance arrangements, a matter that reportedly drew a criminal investigation from the Department of Justice; Tricolor filed for bankruptcy amid allegations of fraud, and even JPMorgan, which prided itself on a fortress balance sheet, wrote off one hundred seventy million dollars tied to it.³⁶ Jamie Dimon's warning to analysts that quarter—that "when you see one cockroach, there are probably more"—was widely quoted, but the more important fact for this analysis is the mechanism of the First Brands failure.³⁷ Its leverage was hidden in exactly the off-balance-sheet supply-chain-finance structures that Buxton Helmsley has previously identified as one of corporate America's most dangerous and least visible liabilities.³⁸
The connection to the annuity is direct and is the reason this is the moment to ask the question. The private credit that failed at First Brands, and the leveraged loans that sit inside the CLOs the company's debt populated, are the same asset classes that asset-manager-owned insurers have loaded into the general accounts backing retirement guarantees.³⁹ When a market has not been tested, the marks on illiquid credit are an assertion. The First Brands episode is the beginning of the test, and it arrives with the assets concentrated in balance sheets whose valuation regime—offshore, scenario-based, related-party—is the least equipped of any in finance to mark losses promptly and honestly. The Financial Stability Board, in a May 2026 report, found that private credit remains untested by a prolonged downturn and singled out its deepening interlinkages with insurers—through asset-intensive and funded reinsurance and through private-equity ownership of insurers that themselves engage in private credit lending—as a vulnerability warranting close attention; the IMF has separately warned that if the asset class continues to grow under limited oversight its vulnerabilities could become systemic.⁴⁰ The insurance balance sheet is where the private-credit cycle and the retirement-security promise intersect, and it is the intersection no one is watching closely enough.
The purpose of forensic analysis is not alarm; it is the conversion of opacity into a checklist. The disclosures required to evaluate an asset-manager-owned insurer largely exist—in statutory annual statements, in the reinsurance detail of Schedule S, in the asset detail of Schedule D and Schedule BA, and in the holding company's public filings. What is missing is the demand that they be read and answered. Buxton Helmsley would require the following before extending trust to any insurance balance sheet shaped by an asset manager, whether the investor is buying the product, allocating to the manager, or underwriting the manager's paper.
First, demand the look-through on related-party assets. An investor should require the precise share of the general account invested in assets originated, managed, or otherwise affiliated with the controlling manager, measured against the regulatory affiliated-investment limit, and should treat proximity to that limit as the single most important governance signal on the balance sheet. The Lindberg matter establishes why: the affiliated-investment cap is the line the law itself treats as decisive.
Second, demand the valuation architecture. Require the share of assets carried at Level 3—those valued by model rather than by market—the identity of who sets and audits those marks, the governance separating the valuation function from the affiliate that benefits, and the differential between carrying value and any available stressed-market proxy. The IMF's observation that secondary-market private-equity assets traded at ninety-two percent of net asset value in 2021 and fell to eighty-one percent within a single year is the relevant cautionary number: model marks move slowly, and then all at once.⁴¹
Third, demand the structured-credit detail. Require the concentration in CLOs and other structured credit, whether the insurer owns the residual or equity tranches that carry equity-like risk at debt-like capital charges, and how the holdings have been reclassified and recharged under the principles-based bond definition and the elevated residual-tranche factor now in force. An insurer that resisted those reclassifications, or whose capital ratio depended on the prior treatment, has told the investor something important.
Fourth, demand the reinsurance map. Require the share of reserves ceded offshore, the share ceded to affiliated reinsurers, the structure of each material treaty—modified coinsurance or funds withheld—the nature and verifiability of the collateral, and a candid statement of what the cedant's domestic regulator can and cannot see. The Vesttoo collapse is the proof that collateral asserted is not collateral confirmed.
Fifth, demand the capital truth net of arbitrage. Require the insurer's capital position computed on a basis that neutralizes the scenario-based discounting and the structured-credit capital relief, so that the economic capital behind the guarantee is visible rather than the regulatory capital optimized to present it favorably. Require the results of asset-adequacy testing, the very analysis the NAIC is now mandating for offshore reinsurance, and read a refusal to provide it as an answer in itself.
Sixth, demand the liquidity plan under surrender stress. Require modeling of the insurer's ability to meet a wave of policy surrenders in a rising-rate or loss-of-confidence scenario without forced sales of illiquid assets at a discount to carrying value. Eurovita is the precedent: the failure mode is not a slow erosion of returns but a sudden freeze.
None of these demands requires privileged information or accuses any specific firm of misconduct. Each can be pursued through public and statutory disclosure, augmented by the direct engagement that is the proper posture of an informed owner. The asset-manager-owned insurance model may well prove to be exactly what its architects describe—a durable, well-underwritten, and beneficial recapitalization of a sector the public markets abandoned. Buxton Helmsley's position is only that the claim is testable, that the tools to test it are in hand, and that an institution which has not run the test has not earned the comfort of the guarantee.
The annuity remains the closest thing in American finance to a promise that cannot break. Whether that is true of any particular annuity now depends entirely on the balance sheet behind it—and that balance sheet has become, for a growing share of the market, the least transparent in the financial system. The promise is only as good as the assets, the assets are only as good as the marks, and the marks, at last, are about to be tested. The investors who will be glad they asked are the ones who ask before the test concludes.
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Referenced Sources:
Fabio Cortes, Mohamed Diaby, and Peter Windsor, "Private Equity and Life Insurers," Global Financial Stability Note 2023/001, International Monetary Fund, December 2023, 9 (estimating that private-equity-influenced life insurers may exceed 10 percent of total U.S. life industry assets).
Cortes, Diaby, and Windsor, "Private Equity and Life Insurers," 1 (observing that private capital may be seen as reinvigorating the life insurance sector by supporting products that traditional insurers no longer wished to write).
Cortes, Diaby, and Windsor, "Private Equity and Life Insurers," 1.
Cortes, Diaby, and Windsor, "Private Equity and Life Insurers," 6 (describing the four strategies and the sub-ten-percent threshold typically applied before a significant-shareholder approval process).
Cortes, Diaby, and Windsor, "Private Equity and Life Insurers," 7 n.4 (Apollo's creation of Athene through the takeover of an annuity book from American Equity Investment Life); Apollo Global Management completed its all-stock merger with Athene Holding in January 2022; LIMRA U.S. retail annuity rankings (Athene ranked first in U.S. retail annuity sales for 2024).
KKR & Co. acquisition of Global Atlantic, announced July 2020 (KKR press release, "KKR To Acquire Global Atlantic Financial Group Limited," July 8, 2020); Cortes, Diaby, and Windsor, "Private Equity and Life Insurers," 4 (reporting KKR's 2020 acquisition of a majority interest in Global Atlantic at approximately three billion dollars); KKR announcement of the acquisition of the remaining minority interest in Global Atlantic for approximately 2.7 billion dollars, expected to close in the first quarter of 2024, with Global Atlantic assets cited at approximately 158 billion dollars versus roughly 72 billion at the time of the original investment.
Cortes, Diaby, and Windsor, "Private Equity and Life Insurers," 7 n.4 and Table 1 (KKR/Global Atlantic, Apollo/Athene, Blackstone/Resolution Life, Brookfield, Carlyle/Fortitude Re); industry reporting identifying additional asset-manager-and-insurer pairings including American Equity Investment Life (Brookfield), Security Benefit (Eldridge), MassMutual (Barings, Centerbridge), and Kuvare (Blue Owl).
Cortes, Diaby, and Windsor, "Private Equity and Life Insurers," 4–5 (citing KKR & Co. Q4 2020 earnings conference call, February 9, 2021).
LIMRA, U.S. Individual Annuity Sales Survey, reporting record U.S. retail (individual) annuity sales of approximately 434.1 billion dollars in 2024, up 13 percent year over year and the third consecutive record year (LIMRA, 2025; the cited survey covers approximately 92 percent of the U.S. annuity market).
Divya Kirti and Natasha Sarin, "What Private Equity Does Differently: Evidence from Life Insurance," published in The Review of Financial Studies, as summarized in Cortes, Diaby, and Windsor, "Private Equity and Life Insurers," 11 (corporate-bond share down more than seven percentage points and private-label ABS share up more than six percentage points within one year of takeover).
Cortes, Diaby, and Windsor, "Private Equity and Life Insurers," 9–11, Figure 4 (private-equity-influenced life insurers hold a significantly larger share of illiquid assets than the aggregate of all insurers).
National Association of Insurance Commissioners data reporting U.S. insurer holdings of collateralized loan obligations of approximately 276.8 billion dollars at year-end 2024, equal to roughly 5.1 percent of total bonds held (as reported in reinsurance-industry coverage, 2026).
NAIC Valuation of Securities (E) Task Force, "Risk Assessment of Structured Securities—CLOs" (2022), as discussed in Cortes, Diaby, and Windsor, "Private Equity and Life Insurers," 10 (an insurer owning all tranches of a CLO of B-rated loans obtains beneficial regulatory-capital arbitrage versus holding the underlying loans directly).
NAIC, Principles-Based Bond Definition project (REF 2019-21), adopted 2023 and effective January 1, 2025, revising SSAP No. 26R, No. 43R, and No. 21R, with no grandfathering of existing holdings (NAIC; professional summaries by EY, KPMG, and Plante Moran, 2024–2025).
NAIC Risk-Based Capital Investment Risk and Evaluation (E) Working Group, interim factor for residual tranches of structured securities of 30 percent for year-end 2023 filings, rising to 45 percent for year-end 2024 filings (as summarized in Willkie Farr & Gallagher, "Update on NAIC Actions on Structured Security Investments," June 2024).
NAIC Life Risk-Based Capital and C-1 modeling work on the capital treatment of CLOs, ongoing through 2025 (NAIC national meeting materials).
NAIC Macroprudential Working (E) Group, "Regulatory Considerations Applicable (But Not Exclusive) to Private Equity (PE) Owned Insurers," adopted June 27, 2022; Cortes, Diaby, and Windsor, "Private Equity and Life Insurers," 16.
Cortes, Diaby, and Windsor, "Private Equity and Life Insurers," 10–11 (a life insurer typically holds capital equal to about 10 percent or less of the value of its assets).
Cortes, Diaby, and Windsor, "Private Equity and Life Insurers," 12, Table 1.
ALIRT Research and AM Best analyses of year-end 2024 statutory filings, as reported in Insurance Journal and Reinsurance Business (2025): total U.S. reserves ceded rose from approximately 1.3 trillion dollars in 2020 to approximately 2.4 trillion in 2024; offshore cessions rose approximately 147 percent to more than 1.1 trillion dollars; Bermuda accounted for roughly 84 percent of reserves ceded offshore, and Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, and Barbados together for nearly 95 percent.
Bermuda Monetary Authority data reporting long-term reinsurance assets of approximately 1.52 trillion dollars as of September 2025 (as reported in reinsurance-industry coverage, 2026).
Industry analysis indicating that asset-manager- and private-equity-backed insurers account for a disproportionate share of offshore cessions and that insurers ceding more than half of their reserves offshore are typically asset-manager sponsored (reinsurance-industry coverage, 2024–2025); NAIC Capital Markets Bureau reporting that private-equity- and asset-manager-owned insurers hold close to 10 percent of life and annuity admitted assets.
Cortes, Diaby, and Windsor, "Private Equity and Life Insurers," 12–13 (the Bermuda Economic Balance Sheet and the optional scenario-based approach permit a more generous discount rate, allowing additional spread on illiquid assets to be booked upfront as capital).
Cortes, Diaby, and Windsor, "Private Equity and Life Insurers," 13 (Bermuda's commercial regime deemed fully equivalent to Solvency II by the European Union and granted reciprocal-jurisdiction status by the NAIC).
Cortes, Diaby, and Windsor, "Private Equity and Life Insurers," 14 n.14 (defining modified coinsurance and coinsurance with funds withheld, and noting the reinsurer's frequent control over assets through an affiliated asset manager).
Cortes, Diaby, and Windsor, "Private Equity and Life Insurers," 14 (asset-intensive offshore reinsurance described as highly complex, less transparent, capable of producing accounting windfalls, and not transparent to the public through general-purpose financial reporting).
Fitch Ratings and industry commentary on the Bermuda Monetary Authority's 2024 regulatory enhancements; Cortes, Diaby, and Windsor, "Private Equity and Life Insurers," 12 (the BMA, since January 2023, requires approval of life reinsurance transactions before execution).
Cortes, Diaby, and Windsor, "Private Equity and Life Insurers," 12 (approval processes operate transaction by transaction and do not necessarily consider the cumulative impact of many transactions over time; not all cedant supervisors have the power to stop transactions).
NAIC Life Actuarial Task Force development of asset-adequacy-testing guidance for offshore reinsurance, advancing through 2024–2025 (Retirement Income Journal; Reinsurance Business); Financial Stability Oversight Council statements on affiliated offshore reinsurance; United States Treasury engagement with Bermuda on risk-based capital, private letter ratings, and offshore reinsurance oversight (2025–2026 reporting).
Cortes, Diaby, and Windsor, "Private Equity and Life Insurers," 14–15 (the Italian supervisor IVASS identified a capital shortfall of 250 million euros at Eurovita, owned by a closed-end fund operated by Cinven, removed management, installed an administrator, and froze policyholder redemptions; the rescue ultimately involved five insurers and twenty-five banks).
White Rock Insurance (SAC) Ltd. court filings (2023) stating that fraudulent letters of credit presented to the platform could total upwards of two billion dollars, including instruments purportedly issued by China Construction Bank that proved fraudulent (Bermuda Re; Royal Gazette reporting, 2023).
Reporting on the Vesttoo Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in Delaware and related Bermuda Supreme Court proceedings initiated by the Bermuda Monetary Authority and the cell platform (Bermuda Re; Lexology; Royal Gazette, 2023–2025).
U.S. Department of Justice, "Owner of Multinational Investment Company Sentenced in $2B Fraud, Money Laundering, and Bribery Schemes," May 2026; United States v. Greg E. Lindberg, DOJ Criminal Division case page. Lindberg, founder and chairman of Eli Global LLC and owner of Global Bankers Insurance Group, was sentenced to a combined twelve years for conduct from at least 2016 through 2019, in which companies he controlled in North Carolina, Bermuda, Malta, and elsewhere invested more than two billion dollars in loans and other securities, and in which he forgave for his own benefit more than 125 million dollars of loans from affiliated companies. See also Bloomberg, "Insurance Mogul Greg Lindberg Gets 12 Years for $2 Billion Fraud," May 26, 2026.
Southland National Insurance Corp. v. Lindberg (North Carolina Court of Appeals), as reported (Lindberg directed approximately 1.2 billion dollars of policyholder funds into non-insurance companies he owned or controlled); the insurers were placed in rehabilitation by order of the Superior Court of Wake County, North Carolina, in 2019; special master Joseph Grier's April 3, 2026 recommendation of approximately 1.625 billion dollars in restitution to eight insurance companies, the largest share (approximately 821 million dollars) owed to Colorado Bankers Life (InsuranceNewsNet, 2026).
Reporting on the Lindberg bribery prosecution, noting that the North Carolina insurance commissioner had reduced the cap on affiliated investments from 40 percent to 10 percent and that the bribery scheme sought removal of the senior deputy commissioner responsible for overseeing Lindberg's insurance group (InsuranceNewsNet, 2024).
Reporting on the October 2025 bankruptcies of First Brands (more than ten billion dollars of debt; as much as 2.3 billion dollars in off-balance-sheet borrowing through factoring and supply-chain finance; reported Department of Justice criminal investigation; chief executive's resignation on October 13, 2025) and Tricolor (Chapter 7 amid fraud allegations); JPMorgan's 170 million dollar write-off tied to Tricolor (CNN, PitchBook, Fox Business, Fortune, October 2025).
Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase third-quarter 2025 earnings call, October 14, 2025, as reported (Fortune; PitchBook; Fox Business).
Buxton Helmsley, "The Hidden Ledger: How Supply Chain Finance Became Corporate America's Most Dangerous Off-Balance-Sheet Liability—and Why Most Investors Still Cannot See It," Insights, April 10, 2026.
International Monetary Fund, Global Financial Stability Report, April 2024, Chapter 2 (pension funds and insurers are principal investors in private credit, with substantial additional exposure through structured vehicles).
Financial Stability Board, "Report on Vulnerabilities in Private Credit," May 6, 2026 (noting that private credit remains untested by a prolonged downturn, that valuation practices are conducted less frequently and involve significant discretion, and that interlinkages with insurers—including asset-intensive and funded reinsurance and private-equity ownership of insurers that engage in private credit lending—are a potential vulnerability); International Monetary Fund, Global Financial Stability Report, April 2024, Chapter 2 (warning that if the asset class remains opaque and grows under limited prudential oversight, the vulnerabilities of private credit could become systemic); see also IMF, Global Financial Stability Report, October 2025, Chapter 1.
Cortes, Diaby, and Windsor, "Private Equity and Life Insurers," 11 (citing Jefferies, secondary private-equity transactions priced at 92 percent of net asset value in 2021 and 81 percent in 2022).
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