I could swear the world is spinning faster than it was this time last year.
In terms of time, we humans hardly count.
If all the time since the big bang were represented visually by a vast ocean, our time on this planet would barely fill a bucket load.
Yet that bucket is full of a dye so intense that we have ended up staining the rest of the ocean a bright new colour that is so dazzling we need shades to be able to look at it directly.
Eternities had passed with all creatures making their way around the world under their own steam. Then suddenly, barely a nanosecond ago wind, then steam, then oil power has been harnessed to fire us around at ever-increasing speeds.
We woke up one day to a world full of automobiles. At the same time a global financial system sprang up out of nowhere.
We had cars and they had liability exposures and so car insurance was invented to go with them. Car insurance needed reinsurance and another global class of business was born. It's been one of our bread and butter bestsellers.
Yet we already know that car insurance's days are numbered. With the advent of driverless cars the day when manual driving is banned will inevitably dawn. We're not quite sure when, but only a fool would bet against it being one day this century.
No sooner was it born than it was gone.
Auto insurance will move to become a blend of pure product liability for the rolling stock and professional indemnity for the software that controls it. In fact, the risk is likely to become so systemic as to be uninsurable. I expect we will have to fund a vast state-backed no-fault scheme, lest the highways fall silent.
It was great while it lasted.
The New York Athletic Club was once a representation of the whitest heat of technology in the most progressive and advanced city on earth.
Now it is an aged monument to the establishment in a fast-maturing metropolis.
Appropriately enough, it was here that we gathered the great and the good of the insurance and reinsurance community, turned on our recording equipment and started to talk.
The question was whether the flowering of the global (re)insurance business would be as brief and colourful as other industries that have blossomed and long since withered.
Needless to say, the time passed quickly...
To view the roundtable supplement please click here.
Mark Geoghegan
Editor-in-chief,
The Insurance Insider