Opinion

Ten days ago, I said that Pioneer CEO Andrew McMellin would need to pull a Houdini act to find the capital to keep Syndicate 1980 going.

It has been action-packed year for brokers.

What drives the value in an insurance business?

Executives who have been upfront about the need to batten down the hatches ahead of the impending casualty storm must be feeling a little put upon.

The pending sale of Asia Capital Re (ACR) to a run-off acquirer – revealed yesterday by this publication – is a painful blow to the Asian reinsurance market.

I don’t enjoy sitting through speaker events

Hurricane season is drawing to a close and wildfires in California are dwindling. But now another “storm” with massive potential impact is gaining strength, and starting to wreak havoc on insurers’ bottom lines.

“The hard market is coming!” one cyber underwriter enthused to me last week.

Five days ago, I asked here if Argo and Mark Watson III had pulled defeat from the jaws of victory after a series of missteps followed their ostensible triumph in the proxy fight with Voce Capital.

Travelers chairman and CEO Alan Schnitzer is a vocal critic of a US litigation culture he claims imposes a “tax across society”. A worsening tort environment was the driving factor in the carrier’s own quarterly earnings shortfall, and has also emerged as key theme of the third quarter reporting period.

Since we broke the news in August that Liberty was set to pull all of its capacity from Pioneer’s Lloyd’s syndicate, there have been question marks around what the MGA-cum-syndicate would look like in 2020 – and even over whether it would be able to trade forward.

The autumn season of reinsurance industry conferences usually runs like a well-oiled machine.