It is what we fear but dare not talk about because our insurance companies are increasingly owned by “their” insurance companies.
We have seen it happen with banks, we don’t want to see it happen in insurance. We don’t know if we have in FSCS the apparatus to keep “pension” like payments coming through “annuities“.
Asset managers have pitched this fast-growing corner of financial markets as more lucrative than traditional structured debt, while still winning pristine ratings from the big credit agencies. Life insurers, which are hungry for long-dated investments to meet their decades-long promises to policyholders, have been studying and investing in these new securitised debt deals as they look to bolster the returns they market on annuities they sell to retirees.
I know this may seem a long way away, but we thought that before the American Bear Sterns and then Lehman Brothers triggered a seismic problem for UK Banks.
The problem in 2008-9 was there was a conspiracy of silence from those who knew from lawyers to investment bankers the CDIs that brought us down were “magic”.
The talk of the main players sounds horribly familiar
So where’s the risk?
The risk is in what’s called “circularity”, what ordinary people call buying what you already buying leading to double counting.
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In addition to concerns over transparency and interconnectedness, they also raised concerns not specific to the Apollo and KKR structures, the people added.
Regulators said that they had identified significant problems in insurers’ multi-asset investment vehicles related to whether the products can offer the returns they promise over the long term.
Regulators said some insurers have already bought investment products that create maturity mismatches, in which structures promise to pay returns over decades, but rely on underlying assets that mature years or decades beforehand. That has raised questions about whether companies will be able to source investments with similar levels of profitability in the future.
There is a sickeningly familiar ending if fears from American Regulators lead to failure. We remember the queues outside Northern Rock.
If you’ve read this far – hear is a footnote from Gordon Aitken – do you agree that annuities are invulnerable?
