Bloomberg

  • Ellen Joan Pollock 
    • New York Times,  Former editor of Bloomberg Businessweek
    • Booknotes - The Pretender: Martin Frankel, by Ellen Polluck - [VIDEO-CSPAN]
  • Bloomberg Originals - Bill Ackman: Herbalife Distributors Turning State’s Evidence - [VIDEO-YouTube-26:17]
  • 1991 0113 - Bloomerg - The Sky May Not Fall In, But..., By Larry Light - [link]
  • 1991 0203- Bloomberg - It's Time For Savers To Check Their Safety Nets, By Bruce Hager - [link]
  • 1991 0414 - Bloomberg - Is First Exec On Its Last Legs? - [link]   
  • 1991 0421 - Bloomberg - Insurance Regulators Fiddled While Policyholders Got Burned: State dithering put millions at risk as insolvencies mounted, By Kathleen Kerwin and Lisa Driscoll - [link]
  • 1992 1213 - Bloomberg - Look What Universal Life Begat, By Suzanne Woolley - [link]
  • 1994 0116 - Bloomberg - Policies of Deception?, By Suzanne Woolley and Gail Degeorge - [link]
    • MetLife - Nurses Retirement Savings Plans, Whole Life, New York Life, 
    • Investment plans have more consumer appeal. So agents are tempted to misrepresent whole-life policies as retirement or savings plans.
  • 2005 0424 - Bloomberg - Watchdogs With Eyes Wide Shut: As investigators pore over the books of AIG, it's becoming clear that for years regulators failed to detect lapses, by By Mike McNamee - [link]
  • 2008 0125 - Bloomberg -
    • <WishList> - 203. The January 25, 2008 Bloomberg article stated, in part: Banks will need at least $22 billion if bonds covered by insurers led by MBIA Inc. and Ambac Assurance Corp. are cut one level from AAA, and six times more for downgrades by four steps to A, Paul Fenner-Leitao wrote in a report published today. Barclays’ estimates are based on banks holding as much as 75 percent of the $820 billion of structured securities guaranteed by bond insurers.
  • 2008 0208 - NYT / By Bloomberg News - MBIA Sells Stock to Aid Rating and Raises $1 Billion - [link]
    • MBIA has raised about $2.5 billion since November, and it said that it would contribute most of the proceeds to its insurance company.
    • Warburg Pincus already bought $500 million of MBIA stock this year.
    • MBIA also sold $1 billion in surplus notes and cut its dividend by 62 percent.
  • 2008 0229 - NYT - A Freaky Friday for Bond Insurers - [link]
    • By taking a big stake in Assured, a smaller bond insurer but widely regarded as rock-solid, Mr. Ross said that the firm would be able to expand its reinsurance business.
      • It has already agreed to reinsure $29 billion worth of securities in Ambac’s portfolio; Bloomberg News says that move will free up $225 million in capital for the beleaguered Ambac.
  • 2008 0627 - Bloomberg - AIG to Absorb $5 Billion Loss on Securities Lending: Insurance Units Wrote Down $13B Tied To Mortgages, by Miles Weiss  ---  [BonkNote]
  • 2009 1204 - Bloomberg - Geithner Slams Bonuses, Says Banks Would Have Failed (Update2), (Goldman Sachs), by Robert Schmidt - 2p
  • 2009 1027 - Bloomberg / Washington Examiner - New York Fed’s Secret Choice to Pay for Swaps Hits Taxpayers, by Richard Teitelbaum and Hugh Son  ---  [BonkNote]  ---  [link]    
    • 2009 1027 - Bloomberg / Washington Examiner - New York Fed’s Secret Choice to Pay for Swaps Hits Taxpayers, by Richard Teitelbaum and Hugh Son  ---  [BonkNote]  ---  [link]
  • 2010 0729 - Bloomberg - Survivors Can Bank Benefits, Skip Insurance Accounts, by Alexis Leondis and Margaret Collins - [link]
    • “It’s very easy for trusted companies to mislead naïve customers, and life insurance companies are trusted,” said Daniel Kahneman, a professor of psychology and public affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and a Nobel Prize winner. “The fact that they seem to be outside the regulatory reach is shocking.”
  • 2011 - .pulitzer.org/finalists/david-evans
    • Finalist: David Evans of Bloomberg News
    • For his revelations of how life insurance companies retained death benefits owed to families of military veterans and other Americans, leading to government investigations and remedial changes.
    • pulitzer.org/files/2011longlist.pdf
  • 2014 0731 - Bloomberg - The Insurance Industry Is Risky. Federal Regulation May Be the Answer You know what’s risky? The insurance industry, says a man who should know, by Peter Coy - [link] 
  • 2018 0529 - Bloomberg - Blackstone's Tax-Free Hedge Fund Pitch Woos More Clients, By Heather Perlberg and Ben Steverman - [link]
  • 2020 0116 - Bloomberg Businessweek - Nobody Makes Money Like Apollo’s Ruthless Founder Leon Black:The private equity CEO with a fearsome reputation skates on the edges of other people’s catastrophes and manages to walk away richer., By Caleb Melby and Heather Perlberg - [link]
  • 2021 1129 - Bloomberg - ‘Pension Poachers’ Are Targeting America’s Elderly Veterans, By Nick Leiber - [link]
    • Larry Eber’s life was derailed when middlemen pledged to help him get supplemental benefits.
    • Similar tales of alleged manipulation are playing out for thousands of former service members and their families.
    • Chantelle Smith, an Iowa assistant attorney general in Des Moines, said it is true that many veterans don’t know they’re entitled to certain benefits. What they often don’t realize is there are free alternatives for help with paperwork, including organizations with no financial stake in the outcome—such as nonprofit veterans service organizations and state and local agencies. 
  • 2023 0316 - Bloomberg - Charting How Years of Stumbles Led Credit Suisse to Crisis - [link]
  • 2024 0514 - Bloomberg - How the ‘Harvard of Trading’ Ruined Thousands of Young People’s Lives: IM Academy promises a Wall Street education. But instead of riches, many of its members have lost everything., by Alice Kantor - [link]
    • [Always Marco] - Marco Moukhaiber, a former concert promoter turned YouTube vigilante, was in his condo in Edmonton, Alberta, in the summer of 2020 when he decided IM was his next target. He’d built a 93,000-person YouTube following with the release of video exposés of MLMs including health insurance company Primerica Inc. and telecom company ACN, and he’d already received cease-and-desist letters and threats of legal action from a few. Now his followers were directing him to IM. After weeks of research, Moukhaiber pretended to be interested in the platform and secretly recorded a recruiter telling him what IM had to offer.
      • Six months later, on Feb. 8, 2021, Moukhaiber released a 40-minute VIDEO-YouTube-[Infiltrating A Pyramid Scheme: IM Academy] exposing Terry’s MLM history and the unsubstantiated claims IM consistently made about young adults getting rich from it. The video described the hundreds of thousands of young people who’d been left penniless and humiliated. Within a few days, it had clocked 590,000 views.
      • Terry sued Moukhaiber for defamation. The YouTuber couldn’t afford a drawn-out legal battle, so he settled, agreeing not to make any more videos about IM. But the damage to the company was done. Videos were circulating by former IM subscribers denouncing the harm the company had inflicted on teenagers around the world.
  • 2005 0424 - Bloomberg - Watchdogs With Eyes Wide Shut: As investigators pore over the books of AIG, it's becoming clear that for years regulators failed to detect lapses, by By Mike McNamee - [link]
    • State regulators defend the job they've done.
      • The problem, they say, is that insurers lied to them.
      • "AIG has acknowledged misleading the New York State Insurance Dept. several times," says Acting New York State Superintendent of Insurance Howard Mills.
        • "We take those transgressions very seriously."
    • States do examine insurers for financial solvency -- but often miss the big picture.
    • "We need to do more," says NAIC President-elect Alessandro A. Iuppa, Maine's insurance superintendent.
    • The obvious solution: national regulation. State oversight of insurers is a relic of 19th century finance, until recently defended by insurers. Now, however, the industry is splitting.
    • Further revelations might force action. Five other big reinsurers, including Swiss Re, MBIA (MBI ), and St. Paul Travelers (STA ), have disclosed that the SEC and Spitzer have subpoenaed records from them. "There's a lot more to come" on insurance companies collaborating to buff up each others' financials, warns a source close to the probes.
    • The suspect reinsurance deals at AIG bear an eerie resemblance to Chewco Investments LP, the LJM partnerships, and other "special purpose entities" that brought down Enron. Like the SPEs, the reinsurers AIG used were supposed to be independent -- but were in fact closely linked to the parent company.
    • Rulemakers must also set reinsurance standards that genuinely measure risks insurers transfer.
    • Insurance is a devilishly complicated business, and the industry often plays by no-holds-barred rules. "Insurance is like the Wild West -- it makes Wall Street seem quite orderly and gentlemanly," says an analyst. It's also an increasingly sophisticated industry in which players take advantage of every international loophole available to move operations offshore in order to decrease scrutiny and cut tax liabilities. In this high-stakes business, regulators can't afford to be caught napping. When they snooze, investors lose.
  • In recent years the financial industry has employed hundreds of former members of Congress, legislative staffers, senior regulators and agency staffers as lobbyists and advisers.
  • In 2009 and 2010, as noted above, (i) the financial industry hired more than 1,400 lobbyists who were former federal employees, including 73 former members of Congress and two former Comptrollers of the Currency, and (ii) the six largest U.S. banks employed more than 240 lobbyists who were former government insiders.607
  • Financial industry trade groups frequently appoint former politicians as their leaders.608
  • For example, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) recently named former Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE) as its CEO.
  • In announcing Senator Nelson’s appointment, the president of NAIC declared, “We needed the gravitas, the phone calls returned, to go to Capitol Hill, to tell our story, defend our turf . . . . I think all the way up to and including President Obama would return Senator Nelson’s phone calls.”609
    • 609 Zachary Tracer & Alex Nussbaum, Ex-Senator Nelson to Run Insurer Watchdog Group, BLOOMBERG, Jan. 22, 2013 (quoting NAIC president Jim Donelson, and noting that former Senator Nelson had previously served as Nebraska’s insurance commissioner and Governor).

2013 - LR - Turning a Blind Eye: Why Washington Keeps Giving Into Wall Street, byvArthur E. Wilmarth, Jr. - 166p