Los Angeles Dodgers Owner’s Troubles Roil Insurance World

The investment office of an insurance company used to be one of the more boring departments in finance, focused on putting customers’ premiums into ho-hum assets like bonds.

But over the past two decades, this onetime backwater has become an engine of enormous wealth, as private equity firms have acquired insurers en masse and redirected those premiums into their own risky investments.

Now, the wisdom of that approach is in the spotlight as one of its biggest stars, Mark Walter, faces a financial reckoning during a federal investigation into whether some of his companies improperly characterized tens of billions of dollars in assets.

Mr. Walter, 66, might be Exhibit A in the how-to manual for transforming insurance money into private fortune, steering a modest asset manager, Guggenheim, to acquire a string of insurers in the years after the 2008 financial crisis. He then oversaw the sale of many of those insurers to his personal investment firm.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/24/business/mark-walter-insurance-dodgers-lakers.html