The Insurance Reckoning with Tom Gober

I believe the scandal building inside America's life insurance industry is bigger than Madoff and bigger than Enron, and it might approach the size of the 2008 financial crisis.I just sat down in New York with the man who's been warning about it for 41 years, and if you want to know what's really going on inside these companies, Tom Gober is THAT guy…Tom is a certified fraud examiner who started his career as an insurance examiner for the state of Mississippi. In his early 20s, he caught a company hiding a hole in its balance sheet with sham reinsurance and wrote it into his exam report, which he signed personally. A few weeks later he pulled the original from the state archives and found his findings had been RIPPED OUT and retyped clean, with his signature still on it.So he went to the US Attorney's office and spent the next two and a half years working undercover with the FBI, with a recorder hidden behind Velcro in his briefcase that he switched on in every exam where the books were cooked. He only broke cover the morning he walked in and saw the accounting department stuffing envelopes that urged people with maturing CDs to buy annuities from a company he knew was broke. That night he drew a map of the building for 40 FBI agents, and the tapes he made put people in prison.He told me he doesn't know of a single other person who understands these schemes and isn't making money from them.Here's what we're going over in Part 1 “The Whistleblower” of The Insurance Reckoning with Tom Gober:* One of the biggest annuity companies in America moved $235 billion of liabilities offshore to its own affiliate, and Tom names it on camera.* The day your insurance company fails, your money gets frozen, and the fund that's supposed to protect you has $0 set aside.* 51 human beings stand between this entire industry and insolvency, and Tom believes some of them know exactly what's going on and are letting it happen.* Industry insiders are calling Tom from all over the world to tell him it's much worse than he thinks, and he expects something to break by the end of 2027.Tom puts the size of the problem at roughly $2 trillion.This is Episode 1 of a series, and in the coming episodes we go deeper into the offshore reinsurance machine and the private equity money sitting behind it.I told Tom that The Big Short has nothing on his story, and I meant every word. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit georgenoble.substack.com/subscribe