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Maybe the wrong question? Legislation could fix this, making state-backed guarantees available only if insurance company is a stand-alone corporation, or some variation thereof. The guarantee is valuable socially. It's the untoward use of it as a financial refuge that isn't.

the guarantee is essential. that’s not the issue. the issue is what role private investors serve given the necessity of the guarantee. they do not, cannot, bear the downside risk. why should they skim from the upside before any downside materializes? 1/

it doesn’t matter whether they are a standalone company or not (although obviously becoming a capital source for private equity is particularly abusive). the risk is borne either by the state or by policyholders if the state absented itself. 2/

you could have regulators insist on safe portfolios, but then what’s the advantage in having regulators make investment decisions indirectly vs a state-owned corporation making those decisions itself? /fin

It’s worked well in NY. Many insurance companies avoid ny because of regulation. Also, government has enough on its plate already. Insurance is a choice, not a part of the commons. Making it part of the government won’t inure it to corruption.

it’s a question, not advocacy, but i think it worth thinking about where we want the boundaries to be and why. i don’t think “enough on its plate” is an answer, the public sector like the private can scale, different ways have different problems. 1/

“corruption” is the private sector baseline. we don’t usually call it that because taking advantage of opportunities for self-interested gain is what private sector actors are supposed to do. 2/

12/8/26, 2:42 pm0 reposts2 likes

is it “corrupt” for PE people to notice there’s a channel for capital whose downside risks are clipped and try to make use of that? i think that’s a silly claim to make. 3/

Er...it's corrupt if they manage to use a publicly owned utility (your idea) for that purpose. Privately? Of course not. What's legal is legal.

No. They are not managing (overtly) publicly owned utilities. They are managing notionally private insurance companies for their own gain. If it seems corrupt, that's because the privateness of those insurance is in my view purely notional, because the state bears the actual downside. 1/

I'm asking why we shouldn't simply the situation by stripping the notional private ownership and making overt what the patterns of actual risk-bearing make clear: 2/

our outrage should be directed at whatever is causing us to provide private investors with such a channel, if we don’t think whatever benefit we get is worth the cost of absorbing that risk. 4/

1) You're way out in front of your skis. This is #37,632 in priority ahead of what needs to be done. I'm all for "Stockholming" every slippery bankruptcy within the financial sector, but the entire point of that is government seizing bankrupt assets to sell back to the

2) private sector later. I no more want government to own insurance companies than I want them to own car companies....or banks. There's no compelling interest for government to own insurance companies. There is a compelling interest in prohibiting the