Declarations

Little Property Coverage

“Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and poor countries tend to purchase very little property insurance coverage. The fact that there is very little information about Haiti’s private insurance market suggests that the market is very small —likely not more than a few tens of millions of dollars.”

—Dr. Robert P. Hartwig, president and economist for the Insurance Information Institute (III), commenting on the size of Haiti’s private insurance market after the devasting 7.0 temblor on Tuesday, Jan. 12. Consequently, Hartwig said, private insurer losses will be modest and will not have a material impact on global insurance and reinsurance markets.

Not Anxious

“From where we sit, we would not be anxious to place business through that marketplace, in a market right now where there is plenty of opportunities, domestically and internationally to find coverage.”

—Alan Kaufman, chairman, president and CEO of Burns and Wilcox, in response to the recently announced plan by New York Gov. David Patterson to boost his state’s financial services industry by recreating the New York Insurance Exchange. The New York Insurance Department is making the new New York Insurance Exchange (NYIE) a higher priority. The vision is for an exchange structured similar to Lloyd’s of London, in which underwriting syndicates would compete to insure or reinsure unusual or very large risks.

Big Bank Fees

“My determination to achieve this goal is only heightened when I see reports of massive profits and obscene bonuses at some of the very firms who owe their continued existence to the American people.”

—President Barack Obama after he called for a fee on the biggest U.S banks to “recover every single dime” the government spent rescuing the financial sector from its worst crisis since the Great Depression. He proposed Wall Street banks pay up to $117 billion to reimburse taxpayers for the financial bailout and slammed bankers for their “massive profits and obscene bonuses.”