The Great Heist in Plain Sight: Private Credit, Insurance, and Your Retirement
The Great Heist in Plain Sight: Private Credit, Private Equity and the Insurance Companies Are Robbing Retail Investors
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Before we start this, we want to invite you to listen to this podcast. It is timely.
A brief overview on who Tom Gober is, for those who are unfamiliar, like us, until Steve Eisman interviewed him on his podcast, The Eisman Playbook.
First, we have been tracking shadow banking and its penetration into consumer credit, commercial real estate, and 401(k)s. But the area we were new to is the insurance sector. And that changed when Steve told me, “You have to listen to this podcast.” So I did. Not because we love Steve, though we do, but because the interview below echoes everything we have been saying and more.
We are consistent with our thesis: credit is where the risk and the catalyst lie. And the insurance scandal is the missing piece.
Who is Tom Gober?
On November 20, 2025, Bloomberg profiled him. Tom told them he’d been seeing warning signs for years and had been vocal about it. More recently, he said the most troubling development yet is the influx of private equity’s billions into insurance.
The industry waves off its critics as needlessly alarmist, always predicting a disaster that never comes. Oh yes, we know this. Denial in a mindless bull market runs senselessly deep.
But that mid-October afternoon, per Bloomberg, Gober’s phone began to light up. Josh Wander, the co-founder of 777 Partners, a private equity firm on Gober’s radar, had been charged with cheating investors and lenders out of almost $500 million. An alleged fraud enabled in part by opaque and intricate ties with U.S. insurance companies.
THE SCANDAL
On March 2, 2026, Steve, in his podcast, The Eisman Playbook, interviewed Tom and this is a perfect time to listen.
The clan (private equity, private credit and the insurances) are coming for retail investors.
LATEST IMPLOSION
Over the past few months, pockets of implosion across private credit and private equity have been accelerating. Yesterday, Blackstone’s $82 billion flagship private credit fund, BCRED, disclosed that redemption requests surged to 7.9% of the fund, well past its standard 5% quarterly cap. Blackstone had to upsize its redemption limit to 7% and then plug the remaining gap with $400 million invested by the firm and its own employees, just to meet all withdrawal requests. Net outflows hit $1.7 billion. The world’s largest alternative asset manager is now using its own balance sheet and its employees’ capital to pay investors heading for the exits.
STOP. READ THAT AGAIN.
Two weeks ago, Blue Owl permanently froze redemptions on a retail-focused private credit fund. Now Blackstone is writing checks from its own pocket to cover the stampede out of BCRED. RA Stanger, the firm that tracks alternative assets, is forecasting a 40% year-over-year decline in BDC capital formation for 2026.
And Blackstone’s Jon Gray, as of this morning, is on CNBC calling all of this “a ton of noise.” The nerve.
It is NOT a noise, Gray. It is the sound of a $3 trillion market finding out, the hard way, that getting in was easy, but getting out is a whole different story.
And it's not just the U.S. Last Friday, the implosion of UK mortgage lender Market Financial Solutions, a company we have been investigating and wrote about in detail, rattled Wall Street lenders and revived warnings of more "cockroaches" in the private credit industry. Reuters cited the MFS collapse directly in its reporting on the Blackstone BCRED redemptions. This isn't some theoretical risk in a white paper. It's spreading, across borders, across asset classes, and right through the walls that were supposed to keep it contained.
What follows is our deep dive into the chaos, the opacity, the fraud, the consumers who are being ignored, and the question no one in power wants to answer: where does this end?