Risk, Re-/Insurance and Future Thinking
From the category archives:
From the WSJ via Clusterstock, it seems that even investors who cashed out of Madoff’s schemes ahead of time may have to divvy up. [B]ecause Madoff is thought to have run a Ponzi scheme, investors could get money back from other Madoff investors who already took money out,” said Brad Alford, who runs Atlanta-based investment adviser [...]
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CEO Jacques Aigrain told Swiss daily NZZ that rates in the reinsurance market are picking up again — “We are seeing that the conditions and margins in the actual reinsurance business are improving.” However, “lower returns on investment should be expected” he went on to say, though perhaps that didn’t really need spelling out. Swiss Re [...]
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In an article called Can the US Do An IMF On Itself? Hellasious posits the global financial systems in terms of fire brigade HQs. Picture the US as the Global Fire Department (GFD). In the last ten years or so the GFD became extremely irresponsible. It ignored the fire safety of its own firehouse, which became [...]
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This just in on the e-mail: Somali Pirates in Discussions to Acquire Citigroup. November 20 (Bloomberg) — The Somali pirates, renegade Somalis known for hijacking ships for ransom in the Gulf of Aden, are negotiating a purchase of Citigroup. The pirates would buy Citigroup with new debt and their existing cash stockpiles, earned from hijacking numerous [...]
This article from the NYT does not make happy reading for D&O carriers.It’s about a mortgage underwriter at WaMu, and is a telling, salutory tale (like so many that are emerging) of corporate greed and, more to the point, stupidity.“If a loan came from a top loan officer, they didn’t care what the situation was, you [...]
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There’s an interesting post from Hellasious on Sudden Debt about the fundamental wrongs in the US economy (which shades over into general considerations on the American Way of Life).His 3 facts are these:Fact 1: There is too much debt in the economy to be properly serviced by the earned income generated. Total debt has doubled as a [...]
From the always wonderful PJ O’Rourke comes this simple person’s take on how we got into this mess: Brokerages were saying, “We’re going to sell you a room full of horse s–. And with that much horse s–, you just know there’s a pony in there somewhere.”
I subscribe to a daily e-mail of interesting factual snippets from delanceyplace.com. Today’s entry is from George Soros’ book, the The New Paradigm for Financial Markets (Public Affairs, Copyright 2008 by George Soros) and contains an interesting account of the roots of the sub-prime crisis, worth quoting in full: “The [real estate] crisis was slow [...]
As news emerges that Merrill Lynch is posting a loss of almost $8bn for the latest quarter (which seems like rather a lot), my eye was caught by this lovely little throw-away snippet in the FT (subs. required): Robert Law, banks analyst at Lehman Brothers, said: “One of the biggest issues with the sector [...]
