"What's different now is that reinsurers are much better about managing capital and not chasing the top line," he said, comparing the current soft market to the one of the late 1990s. Then "you would have seen a flurry of blue-light specials in the last week of December," he said, referring to the signal for shopper bargains at Kmart.

Mr. Sapnar, who reviewed the renewal situation for casualty lines, followed two Bermuda executives who discussed the property and specialty sectors--Kevin O'Donnell, president of Renaissance Reinsurance Ltd., and Conan Ward, chief executive officer of Validus Re. All three executives pointed to significant amounts of reinsurance capacity as one key driver to keeping prices down.

Comments made by Mr. Sapnar and Mr. O'Donnell also indicated that the executives don't see any change to harder prices in their reinsurance market segments in the near term.

For example, Mr. O'Donnell, when asked if some property reinsurers might have hesitated to deploy all of their capacity in January in anticipation of harder prices later in the year, said he saw no evidence of such a trend. "I didn't get the sense that there were people holding capacity back in hopes that we're going to see a hardening market," he said.

Mr. Sapnar, responding to the question of what it would take to harden casualty insurance and reinsurance prices, said the answer is negative cash flows.

"Absent a cash-paying or significant property event that moves a lot of capacity out of casualty to the property side, I don't see anything over the next 24 months that's going to reverse things."

"It's been the same story for the last 36 months--[prices] flat to slightly down."

Earlier in the call, Mr. Sapnar, who presented 10 things for listeners to know about the casualty market, highlighted one item on the list--new excess-layer casualty insurance capacity that came into the United States and Bermuda in 2009--as a development that "didn't help rates."

Mr. Sapnar said the new capacity that arrived over the past 18 months was completely "comprised of former AIG [American International Group] people or designed to take advantage of AIG issues."

The new excess casualty players "did not even meet half of their aggregate premium targets," said Mr. Sapnar, and attributed their failure to do so to three factors: good underwriting at the new companies in some cases, inadequate financial-strength ratings in others, and activities of incumbent markets that fought to keep business.

Summing up his 10-item list, he said that strong balance sheets, good results and new capacity are holding down rate hikes.

While the casualty reinsurance business remains profitable as a result of favorable loss cost trends globally, he said he believes those trends are unsustainable. Historically, "frequency is almost always cyclical and severity is almost never negative," said Mr. Sapnar.

During his remarks, he also made note of a growing disparity between loss-ratio picks of casualty insurers and reinsurers for the same books of insurance business.

He put the difference at "a good 5 points" on volatile lines such as directors and officers liability, professional liability and some umbrella business. Although he said the differences weren't as evident for lines like workers' compensation and general liability, "it does show a growing trend of a difference in view in the market that makes agreeing [to] reinsurance terms more difficult."

He also said the fact that insurer balance sheets had recovered from 2008 problems last year meant that ceding companies purchased less reinsurance at Jan. 1.

"We did see increased retentions, or in some cases whole programs go away," Mr. Sapnar said.

Mr. O'Donnell and Mr. Ward also commented on waning demand during their presentations.

Mr. O'Donnell, speaking about the property market, said strong cedent balance sheets, together with a "reduction in uncertainty and fear, [had] led to...significant reduction in [reinsurance] limits [purchased] by some large buyers."

Overall, he described property market renewals as "softening but still satisfactory," and cited publicly available figures on U.S. property catastrophe prices, putting them in the range of 5-to-10 percent down.

Mr. Ward, who spoke about several specialty markets, including marine, energy, aviation and terrorism, highlighted the Gulf of Mexico energy sector wind damage insurance market as a place where both insurers and reinsurers have seen lower demand. He attributed low levels of insurance to take-ups to tough stances taken by insurers in 2009 on prices and terms.

Mr. Ward said insurer discipline could mean that only about half of aggregate limits for wind exposure that were put into the insurance and reinsurance markets in 2008 will be in those markets in 2010. Specifically, he said wind aggregates, which totaled $10-to-$11 billion in 2008, would only be about $5.5-to-$6 billion in 2010, with reinsurers covering 30-to-40 percent of total aggregates.