As everyone already knows John Stankey is not your friend and is a very unethical dude but beware of one of his latest scams regarding retiree assets!!!
As some retirees already know, their retirement funds are now being paid and controlled by a company called Athene and are no longer managed by AT&T or insured by the federal government.
But this impacts everyone!! All AT&T retirees and employees should be concerned. Below is a synopsis of a recent NYT article regarding this practice.
"Through Athene, an insurer it helped create and later merged with, Apollo acquired portfolios of annuities — a type of insurance policy that guarantees income streams, usually for retirees — from other insurers and used the premiums collected to help expand its lending businesses, from mortgages to aircraft financing.
Athene, which now represents about half of Apollo’s business, also issues annuities and has become the biggest U.S. issuer of such policies. Last year, it managed $236 billions of annuity policies and other securities. The firm’s innovation has spurred several copycats, transforming private equity firms — with many rebranding themselves “alternative asset managers” — into influential players in the insurance industry.
Insurance assets are attractive to private equity firms because they provide so-called permanent capital, which minimizes the need to raise funds from big investors every few years. But the firms’ swift move into insurance has worried regulators, bankers and researchers, including those at the Federal Reserve, because the firms often invest the insurance premiums more aggressively in private markets — which are opaque, hard to value and largely outside the purview of the strict regulation that governs banks — than in securities like U.S. government and corporate bonds.
Although retiree money is not at immediate risk, Fed and university researchers are concerned that the complex and opaque nature of arrangements between some private equity firms and their “captive” insurers could be masking risk building in the system.
“Within days of a P.E. acquisition of an insurance company, they tilt their bond portfolios to riskier assets,” said Natasha Sarin, a professor at Yale Law School who has studied the investments that private equity firms make compared with traditional insurers. U.S. Treasuries and investment grade corporate bonds are among assets considered generally safe."
All other considerations being equal you might want to select the lump sum over the annuity if that is available to you. Your decision!!