Dear friend,
In 2010 and 2011 when we last gathered some of the industry's most senior movers and shakers round a table in Monte Carlo, we heard progressively more frustrated tales of woe around the latter stages of the late soft market cycle.
Read on and you will see that 12 months later little has changed, except that this time the market satisfaction levels were in fact slightly higher than last year, when some of the industry's frustrations boiled over into these very pages!
This was probably because we've had a pleasant H1 and there has been better news on the ratings adequacy front - after all, cat has had a well-deserved bounce and while casualty hasn't reversed, it has at least probably stopped going down for the first time in eight years.
But all this is by the by.
For what surprised me about this gathering was that what I lobbed in as a warm-up question ended up taking up more than half of our allotted time.
This is the first time since perhaps 2008 that I've seen a room full of CEOs talk for quite so long and in such detail about the dangers inherent in the world economy and the possibility of their spilling over into the global (re)insurance sector.
To access the roundtable please click here. Good night and good luck.
Mark Geoghegan
Editor
The Insurance Insider