Opinion

Nothing is ever as short-tail as it seems.

Activist investors can seem a bit like particularly rude gate-crashers, who roll up at midnight, without a gift, unwashed and probably with a bloodied nose from a fight.

JLT is an expensive buy for Marsh & McLennan Companies (MMC) at a valuation of 25x earnings. But you have to pay for quality, and – perhaps above all else – for scarcity.

Hiscox is likely to be the first of many syndicates to shrink their 2019 capacity.

The path to launching a balance sheet reinsurer rarely runs smoothly – especially when Chinese money is involved.

As the dust settles on what at one stage seemed to be the big hurricane of this season, (re)insurers can reflect on what Florence might have brought had it maintained its wind speeds as it made its way towards the Carolinas.

While the TPA sector is contracting, it is far from disappearing; Sedgwick is the leading TPA, handling more than 3.6 million claims annually.

Market observers may well look back on the China Re-Chaucer acquisition as a turning point for the involvement of Asian money in Lloyd’s.

If one thing was apparent this week in the French-speaking principality of Monte Carlo it was the collective “bof” that delegates emitted about the imminent arrival in the US of Hurricane Florence.

Don’t take anything for granted.

Are you an economist or an anthropologist? Or to put it another way, what wins out in the end: money or culture?

It’s apparent that the insurance industry is really worried about cyber coverage gaps.