It will take guts for executives of excess and surplus lines carriers to get through 2010, especially those who head up publicly traded operations, experts said at an investment analysts' conference recently.
XL employees are no longer working to avoid a crisis, the Bermuda company's chief executive said, reporting a 2009 fourth-quarter net loss of $40.3 million an improvement over the $1.4 billion loss for the period in the prior year.
Carriers and brokers selling Side-A directors and officers liability insurance coverage by delivering warnings about the increasing severity of shareholder derivative lawsuits may be overstating the trend.
Brokers say that while liability coverages addressing green-building risks have been slow to emerge, property insurers have responded much more readily to calls for new coverage solutions.
"Greenwashing" sounds like a reference to environmentally friendly laundry products, but when the term is applied to construction or property management operations, it can signal decidedly unfriendly consequences for participants in the building process.
Insurers that delayed their reinsurance purchases didn't get any notable late-December bargains from disciplined reinsurance underwriters, but soft pricing trends continued for Jan. 1 renewals.
Researchers delivered good news to directors and officers liability insurers who cover defendants in securities class actions, revealing today that the number of actions plummeted 24 percent in 2009, falling to 169 in total.