Money Traces

Mark Walter’s 42% Problem: How His Insurance Empire Became a Capital Risk If you bought an annuity from a life insurer, would you know if nearly half of its investments were tied to companies connected to its own corporate family? That is the question now sitting behind one number in Mark Walter’s insurance empire: 42% . AM Best says that was the share of Delaware Life’s investments classified as affiliated at the end of 2025, up from 3% after a major reclassification following an internal review. Federal prosecutors and the SEC are examining whether certain private-credit investments at Delaware Life and Clear Spring Life were improperly classified as unaffiliated. No fraud charges have been announced. TWG Global says there was no fraud. But the consequences are no longer confined to accounting. Two major banks have paused distribution of Delaware Life products, while a planned $10 billion capital transaction with Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala remains incom...

Washington has just moved one of the AI boom's biggest bottlenecks from the server room to the power grid. The artificial intelligence boom has spent years chasing one scarce resource: computing power. Now another bottleneck is becoming impossible to ignore. On August 26, 2026, President Donald J. Trump signed Executive Order 14420 , declaring a national emergency over vulnerabilities associated with foreign-produced equipment used in the U.S. bulk-power system. The order directly connects that concern to the rapid growth of data centers, artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing and defense production. The important part is not simply that Washington is tightening rules around foreign equipment. It is that the machinery required to deliver electricity to the next generation of AI infrastructure is becoming a strategic asset in its own right. ...

The Corporate Shift: Washington Puts AI 'Surveillance Pricing' Under Federal Scrutiny The long-standing expectation of a transparent market price is now under serious regulatory pressure. Behind the scenes, businesses are increasingly using data-driven pricing systems designed to estimate how much an individual consumer may be willing to pay. But this invisible profiteering machine has just run into a massive federal wall in Washington. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has put the tech-retail pricing model under a new level of federal scrutiny by releasing a proposed Enforcement Policy Statement aimed directly at the deceptive and unfair underbelly of "personalized pricing" or "surveillance pricing." While the FTC openly admits it lacks the congressional power to issue a blanket ban on the practice entirely, it is setting the stage for potentially significant compliance costs. Under the...

The Grid Bottleneck: How AI Data Centers Are Triggering an American Energy Crisis The global race for artificial intelligence dominance is no longer just a battle of software algorithms and microchip designs; it is increasingly becoming a high-stakes resource competition over the American power grid. As tech giants accelerate the construction of massive data centers to house next-generation AI clusters, federal regulators and energy experts are sounding alarms over a looming capacity crisis that could reshape the economics of US infrastructure. Federal regulators and energy officials are increasingly focused on the rapid growth of large electricity loads from data centers, as these concentrated demands create new challenges for grid planning, reliability, and the cost of connecting large users to the system. FERC has specifically identified data centers and other large energy users as a growing grid-integration issue. ...

MONEY TRACES | FINANCIAL INTELLIGENCE Zillow Paid Redfin $100 Million to Leave the Rental Market 31 Days Later, Redfin Agreed to Be Bought by Rocket. A Money Traces investigation If you searched for an apartment anywhere in America in the past year, you probably used one of two websites without thinking twice about it. Zillow. Or Redfin. For part of that year, the two sites could look like competing storefronts — while Redfin's multifamily rental-advertising business had already been handed over to Zillow. On February 6, 2025, Zillow and Redfin signed a deal. Zillow paid Redfin $100 million. In exchange, Redfin agreed to shut down its own rental-advertising sales team, hand its multifamily advertising customers over to Zillow, and stay out of that specific market for up to nine years. Rent.com and ApartmentGuide.com — Redfin's...