On this very day six years ago the greatest financial catastrophe of our lifetimes was crystallised in a single moment as Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy.
Like all great crises it started a long time before, with a series of imperceptible changes that compounded and mutated.
George W Bush's easy money of the early noughties, the gradual adoption of fractional reserving by the Feds, the advent of securitisation and an over-reliance on financial modelling have all been fingered.
Might it be the abandonment of the last traces of the gold standard by Nixon in the early seventies that started the rot?
Indeed, could the problem's roots go all the way back to the formation of Fannie Mae in 1938, or the Federal Reserve in 1913? Economists will still be arguing about it for decades to come.
Today is a great day to re-read the famous quote from The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, which should be familiar to all of us in the global reinsurance sector:
"How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked.
"Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly."
In our business we can readily see the wisdom in this one. Cat reinsurers know all about it.
Over thousands of years tectonic plates move imperceptibly towards one another, centimetre by centimetre, until one day the structures shatter with terrifying destructive power. The resulting losses are enormous and can even occur in areas that are not particularly well known for regular seismic activity.
Casualty players recognise it too. Errors that are imperceptible at first compound over such a long time that what starts out as a tiny miscalculation can eventually cause a catastrophic result.
An over-optimistic return assumption baked into pricing here and an overly generous concession on coverage conditions there, and in a few years you are a long, long way off course.
Then comes the sudden and chilling realisation that it is too late for any remedy.
The business you have been writing for the last decade is all toxic and no matter how far and fast you raise today's pricing and restrict today's terms and conditions, you are still heading for financial ruin.
So what can we do? Should we simply shrug our shoulders and be resigned to our fate?
A common feature of famous quotes is that they end up getting misquoted, or not quoted in full. If we go back to our Hemingway and carry on reading we'll find extra detail that is always missed.
In the book Bill immediately asks a secondary question about Mike's bankruptcy:
"What brought it on?"
"Friends," said Mike. "I had a lot of friends. False friends..."
In times like these, it is important to know who your friends are. Soft market brokers are always friendly and full of new ideas on how to put your surplus capital to good use. But it is always worth remembering that - just like you - they have targets to hit, shareholders to please and squeezed margins to relieve.
Take a long, hard look before putting a line down on a new multi-year mega scheme - for in the long run it's your neck on the line, not theirs.
To view the second of our Monte Carlo dailies please click here
Mark Geoghegan
Editor, The Insurance Insider