Election Results: Before getting into today’s topic, I wanted to release the results of the Best CEO vote! Your winner is actually not quite a CEO. His official title is Vice Chairman of Insurance at Berkshire Hathaway. That’s right your winner is Ajit Jain! Ajit has successfully managed the largest Continue Reading
The Role of Liability Laws In A Divided America
Why are Americans so divided? There is a villain here that never gets discussed. It’s called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This was the provision that shielded internet providers, and later social media networks, from liability for the content of users. Why is this so important? It means Continue Reading
Six Degrees of John Charman: Sompo Acquires Aspen
With last week’s news that Aspen agreed to be acquired by Sompo for $3.5B, I thought it was worth doing a brief retrospective on the Aspen saga and how they ended up here along with the delicious irony of Sompo being the ultimate acquirer. The recent sale was actually Aspen’s Continue Reading
The US Intel Investment Is Bad News For Insurers
Most of you have likely seen the news about the government taking a 10% stake in Intel. There are a lot of significant concerns raised by this action, but one issue, admittedly more local, I haven’t seen mentioned is the likely insured losses it creates. It’s probably worth doing a Continue Reading
What’s Good For The Goose…
So I’m going to be critical of Evan Greenberg today. Those who know me know I was an early backer of Evan’s back at Ace and have always been one of his biggest supporters. I was at the head of the Evan bandwagon before there was a wagon. It was Continue Reading
USAA Has Lost Its Mission
With all the news around California fires, year end earnings, and so on, I didn’t have the chance to write about Juan Andrade leaving Everest Re to take over USAA. I’ve met Juan a number of times over the years and he is a very capable executive. However, USAA needs Continue Reading
How State Farm Lost $8B In California
Yes, they underpriced business and had poor risk management. I think we all know that. But how did it happen? If you saw the recent Wall Street Journal article, you know that a state manager chose to prioritize making the agents happy over making State Farm money. This led to Continue Reading
State Farm Policyholders Unite!
As a follow up to my recent piece on State Farm’s capital situation, I wanted to expand on the fundamental tensions underlying State Farm and its governance. State Farm, as you all know, is a mutual. That means its policyholders own it. Normally, owners of a business make the decisions Continue Reading
How Long Can State Farm Lose Money? A Long, Long Time!
When I last wrote about State Farm, I suggested they had somewhere between $75-100B of excess capital. I commented at the time that their excess capital alone would make them the largest US insurer outside of Berkshire. Since then, State Farm has proceeded to post larger and larger underwriting losses Continue Reading
How to Reform Sports Gambling
Sports gambling is spiraling out of control, sort of like, well, an addict spiraling towards rock bottom. In just the last few weeks alone, there have been scandals about a NBA player sabotaging his performance to win bets, a finance employee for the Jacksonville Jaguars stealing tens of millions from Continue Reading