Another Year, Different Stories to Tell?

The calendar pages have turned and it’s already 2009. Geez. Well, we can’t do anything about the years going by, after all it’s better than the alternative. But we can look forward certainly, to more, hopefully different, stories to tell.

Headlines about the wild-flying years of easy credit that came to a screeching halt in 2008 leaving many people and companies absolutely buried in debt? Insurance giants toppling under the weight of their inability to manage their own risks? Credit crisis? Mortgage foreclosures? Widespread layoffs? So last year – or so one hopes.

After the mountain of bad news that piled up last year, just about everybody seems to feel relieved it’s no longer 2008 and hopeful that the news going forward will be easier to bear than the headlines of the past. But will they?

Utilizing our own online database of insurance stories – which we tout as the largest insurance article archive in the world, at least after Google – Insurance Journal looked back at the five most-read stories of 2008 on our Web site, www.insurancejournal.com.

What we found is something we should have expected: The biggest stories of 2008 involve issues that will likely have a major impact on 2009. The most-clicked on insurance headlines at www.insurancejournal.com last year were:

It will be interesting to see if the defining industry issues of 2009 will be a continuation from the most-read stories of 2008. Three of them in particular stand out as distinct possibilities.

The most-read piece on our Web site was a news story from April announcing Liberty Mutual Group’s acquisition of Safeco Corp., a deal that made Liberty Mutual the fifth-largest property/casualty insurer and second-largest surety writer in the country. That acquisition, which fused Safeco into Liberty Mutual’s Agency Markets, created an organization with 15,000 independent agencies – a behemoth whose every move will likely have a significant impact on the entire independent agency system in 2009 and beyond.

As might be expected, several of the top five stories involved the insurance giant no one can stop talking about: AIG. Number two was an exclusive Insurance Journal report in September detailing how – despite assurances that AIG insurance subsidiaries are sound – producers across the country had begun moving accounts from AIG affiliates. Number five was a Reuters report detailing how AIG’s collapse is boosting the market prospects of AIG’s competitors.

How the collapse of AIG plays out will be an issue for the foreseeable future. As will the fallout from the widespread economic crisis. But hopefully, squeezed in between headlines of trouble and woe, will be some happy reading for 2009.