Athene Holding ($ATHS) podcast mentions
Right. So we talk about that a lot. And the modern presupposition for most educated people, certainly in the West, I mean, as in west of Athens, is that I should be able to make money at what makes meaning. In fact, I really should make money. I want to make the world a better place and I want to be fulfilled and I want to make a killing. And that should all work easily in the universe, should be organized around that. The universe is not organized around that premise. The universe, the world is doing what it's doing, period. The overwhelming majority of human history, meaning-making and money-making were two different things. You know, I mean, you do the poetry thing on the side or you did the art thing on the side and meaning-making and money-making don't have to be the same. We call that, there's the vocational lifestyle where my life is in my work and I get to do one thing for all of it. That's really rare. It's a very modern idea. If it happens to work for you, if you happen to be conveniently configured. So one student walks up to office hours, sits down, says, so what's going on with you? Well, I'm in computer science. I'm really good at AI. I'm particularly fascinated how AI can affect the retail world and enterprise software. So I'm kind of thinking, what might I do with that? I went, oh, that's really convenient to be you right now. Next student, Allison, sits down. What are you into? I'm into, I'm really into documentary film, preferably about nature. I don't actually, newts. I'm into doing documentary film about newts. Oh, terribly inconvenient to be you right now. You don't get to pick the you, you don't get to pick the universe, you don't pick your time. So you just have to navigate the gap between how you're working and how the world is working and make it work as best you can. Last thing I'll say is there are 3 ways to think about work: jobs, careers, and callings. You do jobs for money, careers for professional development, and callings for missional fulfillment and values realization. Most people stack those vertically. A job is down here, a career is better, calling is even better. We hold those horizontally. They're just different.
Dave Evans · The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway · Why “Follow Your Passion” Is Bad Advice — with Bill Burnett and Dave Evans · 2026-09-10Hedge fund billionaire Chris Rockos is set to leave the UK and move to Greece. Bloomberg understands that the prominent financier will also open an office in Athens as part of the move. The star trader was ranked the third highest UK taxpayer in the Sunday Times' latest annual list, with a bill of £330 million last year. The move comes After Britain abolished its non-dom regime and increased taxes on several forms of wealth, Greece now offers qualifying foreigners a flat annual tax of €100,000 on all overseas income.
Caroline Hepker · Bloomberg News Now · UK Borrowing Costs Set To Soar, Canada Hits Back At US, More · 2026-09-08Hedge fund billionaire Chris Rockos is set to leave the UK and move to Greece. Bloomberg understands that the prominent financier will also open an office in Athens as part of the move. The star trader ranked third in the Sunday Times' latest annual list of top taxpayers in the UK, with a bill of £330 million last year. The move comes after Britain abolished its non-dom regime and increased taxes on several forms of wealth. Greece now offers qualifying foreigners a flat annual tax of €100,000 on all overseas income.
Caroline Hepker · Bloomberg News Now · Oil Surges Near $100, Billionaire Leaves UK, More · 2026-09-08And let me just jump in. So the— I, I learned of these like a month ago just from actually reading, you know, like Apollo's, uh, investor presentation. And it's pretty remarkable. I was surprised that basically these funding agreement back notes, FABNs, and then Funding Agreement-backed repos or repurchase agreements, FABRs or something. Basically, it allowed institutional investors— basically, net-net are lending money to private equity companies and private equity-owned insurance companies, but the private equity— the insurance companies treat it as if they're like a life insurance policy. So it's like you have a bunch of grandmas and grandpas who have a life insurance policy, and then you have Harvard, who lent, you know, an Apollo, you know, Athene, Apollo's own insurance company, like at 5%, but legally they get to kind of pretend that it's that, that Harvard is just a million grandmas lumped together in a room.
Jack Farley · Monetary Matters with Jack Farley · What Actually Happens When a Life Insurer Fails (It's Worse Than a Bank) | Pranjal Drall and Andrew Granato on How Private Equity Turned Life Insurance Into a Taxpayer Backstop · 2026-09-06Yeah. So one thing which is, you know, Apollo is the pioneer of this. They did have a video come out saying, does private equity own insurance? And they said this is, quote, fake news. And I guess we can all agree that the following statement, private equity owns insurance companies is technically an incorrect or imprecise language. The private equity management company and the insurance company are both owned by parent entities, by one parent entity. And then the private equity, private credit alternative asset management business, those loans, a lot of them go into the insurance company's books. So that is what's literally happened. So just want to, you you know, give a shout out to the content creators at Apollo who, you know, made it, made it, you know, they're, they're in the game. We're all doing content creation. We're all in the game. But yeah, Athene, Athene, which is the insurance company owned by Apollo. So it was actually not Apollo's investor presentation, but Athene's fixed income investor presentation that they, they showed just what their decade of dominance across organic inflow channels, how they have retail annuities, flow reinsurance, pension group annuities, and then funding agreements, which include funding agreement-backed notes, FABNs. And they say they have number one market share over the last 12 months in the FABN market share. So they, in 2025, they did $35 billion worth of funding agreements, which is quite similar to borrowing money. I believe, I believe that's an accurate statement.
Jack Farley · Monetary Matters with Jack Farley · What Actually Happens When a Life Insurer Fails (It's Worse Than a Bank) | Pranjal Drall and Andrew Granato on How Private Equity Turned Life Insurance Into a Taxpayer Backstop · 2026-09-06Yes. And I think actually Apollo's— Athene's also a borrower through the Federal Home Loan Bank system, which is a large lender to the banking system, and it's for home loans to support that mission. So people could say, oh, Apollo is perverting that mission. I actually will say that Apollo is a giant mortgage lender. Athene is, you know, they own a lot of those loans. And I actually think that there are things that are further from the FHLB mission that are done in banks, like Silicon Valley Bank was a giant borrower from the FHLB system. And, you know, I interviewed some of these people and they were like, well, like Silicon Valley Bank, they did so much for community development and low-income housing. And they did like $1 billion in low-income housing, which obviously is a lot of money, but relative to the vast sums that they were borrowing or relative to the— that like they had more loans out to wineries in California than they had. So I actually think that there's like, there's a lot of nonsense. The FHLB lending, that's like not a policy. So I think it actually is a reasonable claim of like, hey, like Athena is a massive owner of mortgage loans. So I actually think it's not a crazy thing.
Jack Farley · Monetary Matters with Jack Farley · What Actually Happens When a Life Insurer Fails (It's Worse Than a Bank) | Pranjal Drall and Andrew Granato on How Private Equity Turned Life Insurance Into a Taxpayer Backstop · 2026-09-06So there's two types of ways, at least two types of ways where alternative asset managers have relationships with insurance companies. One is they literally own them. So Apollo owns Athene, KKR owns insurance companies. And then there is they just have agreements. So Blackstone has agreements with insurance companies. Blue Owl has an agreement with Cuvaré, which is an insurance company. So they own Cuvaré's asset management company, but they don't own the insurance company. So even if they don't own the insurance company, they have relationships.
Jack Farley · Monetary Matters with Jack Farley · What Actually Happens When a Life Insurer Fails (It's Worse Than a Bank) | Pranjal Drall and Andrew Granato on How Private Equity Turned Life Insurance Into a Taxpayer Backstop · 2026-09-06Yeah, I mean, until a couple weeks ago, I had never heard of Delaware Life or Clear Springs. And, you know, then we learned that, you know, they had been reporting their affiliate— underreporting their affiliated assets by an order of magnitude for years. And right now they're the, you know, the current subject of a massive wave of corporate transactions where their ultimate owner, you know, Mark Walter, CFTC is doing things like trying to sell the Lakers in order to stabilize these insurers and get them back into compliance. So I think that this, this problem of a lack of scrutiny, I think is, is systemic. And, you know, one reason to think that, you know, the largest scale players, you know, might be, you know, not the most aggressive ones is that they do have a lot of eyes on them. There was a lot of eyes on Athene. I don't believe there were a lot of eyes on Clear Spring or Delaware Life. And, you know, it's just, it's very difficult to observe all of these things on a macro level, and that might get worse with some of these smaller insurers.
Andrew Granato · Monetary Matters with Jack Farley · What Actually Happens When a Life Insurer Fails (It's Worse Than a Bank) | Pranjal Drall and Andrew Granato on How Private Equity Turned Life Insurance Into a Taxpayer Backstop · 2026-09-06I'll do through each of the four. And I, I call 'em the Four Horsemen because I think any one of these if it burst onto the scene without— I'm not even gonna use the intervention word, but without action by the Fed and Treasury. Any one of these four could spark a new great financial crisis. I really believe that. And I think you'll see what I mean when I run through these four. All right, here's number one. So, the first big problem that is now on the scene is fraud and unanticipated losses in the insurer-funded shadow banking system. So, Mark Walters and Guggenheim, that's the immediate place of this, and you're probably saying, "Well, Mark Walters, he's the guy who owns the Dodgers." Until a couple of weeks ago, he owned the Lakers. And it comes to light that he made those purchases by getting loans from, let's call it, captive insurance organizations, captive insurers that he controls through Guggenheim Partners, one of his, one of the big financial firms that he controls. And so, this is something that's been going on for a long time, not in as egregious a manner as Mark Walters did it, where he's borrowing from companies he controls to buy the Lakers, buy the Dodgers. But look, this has been something that Berkshire Hathaway has done for a long time. They've got GEICO as a source of permanent capital to fund what Warren Buffett does. This is what Apollo does with their captive insurer, Athene. Something I've been writing about for a couple of years now, that we've developed this banking system, shadow banking system. It's not regulated like commercial banking system, but this is a source of funding for so much private credit activity, private equity activity. The funding, the money is coming from typically annuity contracts at life insurers that are affiliates or captive of these asset managers. And I say something I've been writing about for a couple years ago, now it's really coming into the public attention because it involves these amazing assets like the Dodgers and, and, and the Lakers. So the thing that makes this from a story into a really nasty event is if we have actual losses that get attached to one of these big insurance firms. That's when this becomes not just a potential scandal, but becomes a Madoff-level incendiary event.
Ben Hunt · Excess Returns · The Fed Credibility Narrative Has Turned | Ben Hunt on AI, the Consumer and Financial Repression · 2026-09-03The broke lady with $80,000 in debt and student loan debt in HR. Yeah, yeah, it's a matter of personal preference. I can't tell you anything because I'm in HR and we're not allowed to have opinions here. Corporate HR, God help you people. No, Robert, we just saved you a million dollars, and you know what, we didn't charge you a dime. It's pretty cool. This is The Ramsey Show. As your business grows, everything becomes more complex. There was a time when Ramsey Solutions had too many disconnected systems and not enough visibility across the business. We wasted too much time chasing information instead of making decisions. That's why we got NetSuite. NetSuite brings your financials, inventory, CRM, and more together in one place. More than 44,000 businesses run on NetSuite, including Ramsey, and now they're taking the next step with NetSuite Next, making it easier to put AI to work across your entire business. NetSuite Next Next helps you make the most of your time, automating routine work like forecasting demand and following up on overdue accounts. With NetSuite Next, AI is built into everything you do, so you can ask it questions just like when you're talking to a member of your team. And right now you can try NetSuite Next for free. If your revenue is at least 7 figures, go to netsuite.ai/ramsey. That's netsuite.ai/ramsey. Ramsey. Welcome back to the Ramsey Show. In the Fairwinds Credit Union studio, Jade Washaw, Ramsey personality, is my co-host today. Cameron is in Athens, Georgia. Hi Cameron, how are you?
Dave Ramsey · The Ramsey Show · Different Outcomes Require Different Choices · 2026-09-02