Today is the first day of hurricane season, but it may also mark the last day of a hardening reinsurance market. While market discipline was very impressive in January, it has started to wobble in May. A month ago, I would have said pricing would remain flat to up next Continue Reading
Is Embedded Insurance Bad For Insurers?
Last week I wrote about the premise of embedded insurance and why I feel, in most cases, it does not benefit the consumer. This week I am back to write how it’s also a bad idea for the insurers! Why? Because you are doomed to be a commodity provider. Dumb Continue Reading
Is Embedded Insurance Bad For Consumers?
I’ve been meaning to write about embedded insurance for some time. Embedded insurance is everything that is wrong with the startup approach to insurance. Rather than look at things from the consumer’s perspective and ask how it helps them, embedded looks at things from the insurer’s perspective: how can we Continue Reading
What’s The Biggest Risk To Banks? Non-Banks Acting Badly
I see so much confusion out there about the banking troubles. This perception that any bank who didn’t receive a bailout 15 years ago is in trouble is so misguided. Or that social media makes bank runs more likely. Or that duration is suddenly a bigger risk than credit. So Continue Reading
Sell Your Berkshire Before It’s Too Late
This coming weekend is the annual Berkshire shareholder meeting, aka “Capitalist Woodstock”. However, like the other Woodstock, it’s been a long time since anything meaningful happened. While Warren is obviously an unparalleled success as an investor, I think even he would admit the annual letters and meetings over the last Continue Reading
The Case For Dynamic PML Limits, Revisited
The very first topic I wrote about when I launched the blog was catastrophe risk management. In the original post, I made the case that a company’s cat risk tolerance should be a function of market conditions and their capital position, not just a measure of amount at risk such Continue Reading
How to Allocate Risk Assets In A Post Free Money World
Continuing my thoughts on how the end of the Financial Repression Era changes the rules…this week is for the CIOs out there, whether at insurance companies, pension funds, family offices, etc. How do you need to think about risky asset classes differently now that there is, once again, a cost Continue Reading
The Revenge of the Balance Sheet
I’ve been building up to this piece for a while now. It’s a little bit like the end of the season episode where you get the payoff for the various plotlines. Today I’m going to tie together all my skepticism of MGAs, my views on overvalued brokers, the importance of Continue Reading
The Hare Who Started A Bank Run
I really thought I was done writing about the Hare, but then I realized it was directly relevant to the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) disaster. As a brief refresher, I wrote during the height of the insuretech boom how the Lemonades of the world tried to win the startup race Continue Reading
Bankrupting Bank Shareholders Is Bad For America
Editor’s Note: Before we get into the big topic, some of you may be expecting my NCAA picks. Unfortunately, I have no time for that right now, but I will share with you my old guide on that for reference as well as the link to the public pick’s you Continue Reading