Hints and tips:
...Among them: a successful activist campaign at Canadian Pacific Railway and his bet against the Municipal Bond Insurance Association....
...With buyout deals, that same scheme transfers all of those assets plus a premium to an insurance company....
...But lengthier litigation is pushing up costs and the time capital must be set aside in case of a claim....
...And in one perverted way it did the trick. Competition dwindled. The cost of reinsurance — the insurance cover bought by insurance companies — spiked....
...across America to already heavily-leveraged companies....
...“Only plaintiffs benefit from theories expanding professional liability; they are harmful to the accountants [and] to the public companies they audit,” says lawyer Jacob Frenkel....
...That is what Andrea had done in 2008 — and received assurances from the watchdogs that they were on the case....
...The agreement is the latest in a series of deals that insurance companies have struck with Berkshire, which is able to use the premium income to make investments — an important part of its business model...
...It’s up about half a euro following news on Wednesday that it would be selling off its UK insurance business Abbey Life Assurance to Phoenix for $1.2bn*....
...“I do not recall any cascade failures of insurance companies during the decade,” he says....
...MetLife argues that life assurance was not the cause of the financial crisis and existing state-by-state regulation is onerous enough....
...AIG pays virtually no tax, a legacy of the huge losses it racked up during the financial crisis and its aftermath. The insurer is not alone in applying losses to reduce its tax liability....
...His chance came when he reached a deal to buy the Bonwit Teller department store next to Tiffany’s and persuaded the owner of the land, Equitable Assurance, to join him in building a Fifth Avenue skyscraper...
...But plenty voice their dismay in private — particularly about the long-running compensation scheme for the mis-selling of payment protection insurance and the level of fines imposed for what some have argued...
...Duncan Sutcliffe, director of Sutcliffe insurance brokers, says there is a growing awareness of cyber liability insurance, but he says when he first looked for underwriters, none of the big UK companies...
...Yet a far bigger question arises: should shareholders be regarded as owners and controllers of companies, even in theory? Indeed, is a limited liability company really owned by anybody?...
...The UK still maintains a system where it is virtually compulsory, on retirement, for retirees to use much of their accumulated pension pot to buy an annuity – an arrangement in which a life assurance company...
...Lombard is based in Luxembourg, where it ranks as the leading life assurance company....
...Chris Fagan, who set up the company in 2005, said the fundraising would leave the Bermuda-based group better placed to capitalise on what he expected to be a wave of further deals for books of non-life policies...
...MBIA and Assured are among several insurers at the centre of the fight to restructure Detroit’s $18bn of liabilities....
...It said in a regulatory filing that it had “received assurances from Kuwait Petroleum . . . that no retaliatory or punitive actions will be taken against the company and its affiliates as a result of the...
...Legal & General, the UK insurer, has gained a foothold in the international annuity market with a €136m (£114m) deal to de-risk the pension book of New Ireland Assurance, the Irish life office....
...Swiss Re said Berkshire was making the claim, first reported by the Insurance Insider, “on the basis of its perception of the performance of the retroceded business and losses incurred to date”....
...However, he said L&G’s UK retail savings arm had a quieter quarter, which the company blamed on a “challenging macroeconomic climate” that had impeded the ability of customers to invest and save....
...Life assurance accounting already has a reputation for being an impenetrable “black box”....
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