"Why did you have to spoil the party?" asked Marty Dolan, an investment banker from Morgan Stanley responding to Mr. Thiele's comments.

Mr. Dolan and William Wilt, a Morgan Stanley analyst, questioned the impetus for what Mr. Wilt described as "sobering comments" included in a PartnerRe press release last week and reiterated by Mr. Thiele during a Tuesday Webcast seminar.

Mr. Thiele, referring back to market commentary released with PartnerRe's third-quarter earnings report in late October, said: "I think I even used the word optimistic" when describing favorable market conditions. At that time he predicted 20-to-45 percent hikes in U.S. windstorm prices, double-digit catastrophe price increases elsewhere, and substantial jumps in other lines.

"Something has changed," he said, noting that he was anticipating a better environment than the company is now seeing outside the United States.

Mr. Thiele said that substantial price hikes are now confined to lines and markets directly impacted by the catastrophes of 2005, while competition is increasing in Asia, parts of Europe and in selected specialty lines.

While Chris O'Kane, CEO of Aspen Insurance Holdings, was wary of predicting the market direction--likening it to predicting the outcome of a 90-minute football game 10 minutes after kickoff--he said the "early signs are a little disappointing in Europe and in U.S. regional business on the property side."

Noting that he would have predicted 10-to-20 percent increases on European property renewals for business that wasn't impacted by losses, he said such renewals now appear to be coming in no higher than the low end--10 percent.

In the United States, he said, the renewals that have come up so far are "the easy ones"--those with diversified insurance books rather than predominately coastal risks. "Those have been put out with modest increases--10-to-15 percent," he said.

"The early signs are not as good as I thought," he said. "But I don't know if they're a reliable guide as to how the game will play out."

Noting, on the other hand, that he previously expected that casualty rates would fall, he said the decline has been halted. He reported that Aspen had an increase in casualty reinsurance rate adequacy for the first time this year in October.

"It was a 1 percent increase, so don't get too excited," he said, underscoring, however, that it contrasted with minus-5-to-6 percent in the earlier months of the year.