55071 The power of a good metaphor should never be underestimated.
We journalists are connoisseurs of the form, sifting, sorting and storing neat similes away in our memory banks for future use. Sometimes it's just for the sheer joy of words and the images they can conjure up.
For instance back in the fourth quarter of 2005, when Katrina, Rita and Wilma (KRW) had done their worst, the then independent reinsurance broker Benfield coined a phrase that perfectly described the market of the day.
It called the post-KRW environment a crème brulée. It was perfect, for the famous French dessert had a hard caramelised top that sat above a soft and creamy underbelly. I was so taken with the metaphor I put a picture of one on the cover of Reinsurance Magazine.
KRW had landed hard on the US cat market, singeing it to the point that a whiff of burning could be detected as programmes were totalled and overtopped.
But while KRW had burnt off the top of US cat it had not displaced anything like enough capital to change pricing in the rest of the world. We had true market differentiation for the very first time. It was a tasty concoction, with plenty of profits to go round for everyone able to reload capital.
KRW also landed into a soft market for money in general, with capital and sources of funding abundant and the pre-financial crisis asset boom in full swing. Start-ups and sidecars soon chipped away at the pleasing crunchy brulée parts of the crème and by 2008 it was indistinguishable from a soft crème caramel.
The trouble is that, barring brief pauses for the 2010-11 cats, that crème caramel has been getting soggier and slightly less sweet year on year.
It's time for a new metaphor.
Last week we kicked off the Monte Carlo season with our 11th pre-Monte Carlo executive briefing in London.
As chair my job is always to do a bit of scene-setting. I've been doing this for the last eight years and because the market has softened overall in every single one of them the tone of my intro has become progressively downbeat as time has advanced.
So this year, instead of rattling off the usual litany of things that were wrong with the market I decided to resort to visual humour.
I explained that in the Insider offices we had started circulating amusing pictures of cute puppies as a way of providing light relief from our day job of confronting the increasingly unpalatable truths that abound.
So we set ourselves a challenge - could we find a metaphor in the modern medium of humorous dog photography that would adequately express the state of today's reinsurance market without causing alarm and any more undue stress?
Yes we could.
The image we found was from a famous UK ad campaign for Andrex (Scottex to some) toilet tissue that has become synonymous with the brand since the 1970s.
In it, a cute beige labrador puppy is nuzzling a roll of Andrex under the slogan "soft, strong and very, very long".
"Welcome to the longest and strongest soft market of any of our careers," I announced to a stunned crowd of 400.
One only hopes this Andrex market proves anything like as absorbent as its namesake.
Unpleasantness is accumulating at an alarming rate and when the reckoning arrives the clean-up will be prolonged and highly challenging.
In such tough times any everyday comforts we can find will be highly prized. No wonder my stunt was met with nothing more than a muffled ripple of nervous laughter.
To read the second of our Monte Carlo dailies please click here.
Mark Geoghegan,
Managing Director,
The Insurance Insider