In July last year, part of a Manhattan landmark changed hands. A stake in One Liberty Plaza, the ageing former US Steel building that looms over a park once occupied by anti-Wall Street activists, was quietly purchased by a Texas life insurer.
A rare transaction in a moribund market for office towers, it received little publicity because the building’s ultimate owner, Canada’s Brookfield Corporation, was both the buyer and the seller.
One of the world’s largest and most complex financial conglomerates, Brookfield sold property to itself like this dozens of times in 2024, using $1.4bn from its insurance arm to finance transactions that supported its “distributable earnings” — a non-standard measure of profit that underpins the corporation’s $90bn stock market valuation.