P&c insurers also had better quality assets and less leverage, he said.

Mr. Dowling said, however, that despite the resilience of the p&c industry, a lasting impact of the global financial crisis is “an emotional scar.”

He said, “There are managers of p&c companies, who despite the fact that their balance sheet was rock solid vis à vis others, were seeing a world that was falling apart, and asset values that were falling apart.” These manager teams “recognized that if something happened—a big event—they would not be able to raise capital,” he said.

“That recognition still manifests itself today,” he added. While rating agencies believe capital is adequate, the thought-processes of p&c executives have been altered, he said. “They’re thinking they need to have a little extra capital in many cases than they might have thought they needed before.”

That has implications going forward for market turns, he concluded.

Mr. Dowling made his remarks during a session titled, “Experts Panel: View From the Outside Looking In.”

On a second Forum panel, “View From The Inside Looking Out,” a group of industry chief executive officers focused on what could go wrong in the months ahead.

Among them, Anthony Kuczinski, president and CEO of Munich Reinsurance American in Princeton, N.J., seemed to underscore Mr. Dowling’s point about post-crisis wounds. Responding to the question of whether the industry is overcapitalized, Mr. Kuczinski replied that it is not.

“I want to bring you back a little bit to the first quarter of 2009, [when] $90 billion left this industry,” he said, referring to the capital depletion from investment losses.

“There were no major catastrophe events to talk about,” he said, presenting a series of “what-if scenarios,” including the possibility the timing investment losses coincided with the middle of a very active hurricane season. “There would be a lot of [insurance] companies not around today,” Mr. Kuczinski stated.

“When I think about excess capital, I think in terms of what could be,” he said. As managements, “we’re in the risk business, and we need to make sure that we have enough…to respond to those events. It doesn’t mean because we haven’t had an event that we have excess capacity that we should that we should just throw away.”