Know Your Options.
This article will briefly describe workers' compensation insurance rating plans that may substantially modify final workers' compensation premiums. Workers' compensation insurance premium charges are modified by one mandatory and a number of optional rating plans or rate adjustments that reflect the employers or insurance carriers experience. Premium...

The allure of the alternatives. (Risk Primer).
Your insurance costs have been increasing; your insurance company services have been declining. Commercial insurers will tell you that long-term relationships are important, yet those same insurers seem to be in the market one day, and out the next. Particularly in tight markets, many of those abandoned or mistreated...

Bermuda's Insurance biannual: The return of the Bermuda Insurance Symposium found industry leaders and risk managers in healthy dialogues--amid the volatile winds of change. (Meeting).
While Bermuda's Southampton Princess hotel played the typically regal hostess to February's biannual Bermuda Insurance Symposium V--or the World Insurance Forum--the uncertain mood on the island was a reflection of the volatile global climate now facing insurers, reinsurers, and their customers. Certainly, the mid-Atlantic's treasure island has...

Ratings vs. reality.
Fitch downgraded its outlook on Berkshire Hathaway earlier this year to negative, despite the company having $40 billion in cash. Yup, $40 billion. Fitch cited the auteur theory of insurance: because Warren Buffett is an older man, it's negativity from here on out. Buffett didn't turn 75 or 100...

Insurance in the red: guaranty funds, already under pressure, now have to cope with the Reliance fiasco. (Insolvency).
The predicted shakeout has arrived. Insurers' weakened debt and financial strength ratings are just one indication of a market in flux. The question facing risk managers is how the uncertainty will affect their future claims. For those who weren't completely in the dark over the past two...

Who insures you? (Environmental Coverage).
You turned a failing factory into a booming business. You made promises to the community and to your shareholders. And you kept them. Then the government declared your property a hazardous waste site. You didn't dump the chemicals. But now you own the factory, so you own the problem....

Avoiding Armageddon.
Yesterday was a typical day at the office. But today felt like Armageddon because you discovered your primary insurance carrier has been taken over by the state's insurance commissioner. It's in rehabilitation and will likely be liquidated. You have several claims pending, including workers' compensation. Could you have done...

An unhealthy Tango.
MONTE CARLO -- Poor ratings houses. They just can't win. They got pounded a few years back for not downgrading questionable carriers like Kemper and Reliance before the carriers let everyone know they were in trouble. Now the ratings houses are getting blamed for putting too much...

Valuable new benefit option offered to ACFEI members: Forensic Testimony Liability coverage.
The American College of Forensic Examiners International (ACFEI) has recently partnered with The Krist Insurance Group LLC to offer Forensic Testimony Hability coverage to our members. The Krist Insurance Group has entered into an exclusive relationship with an A++ A.M. best rated insurance carrier to market this important liability...

Vanishing--slowly but surely--into thin air: in 1981, there were 124 U.S. reinsurers reporting to the Reinsurance Association of America. Only 45 of them were left by 2002, according to the RAA, and some of those that are left are now in runoff.
Few U.S. reinsurers got out of the last decade alive. Small and midsize independent U.S. reinsurers have almost completely disappeared. Reinsurance subsidiaries of large insurance companies have been sold or put into runoff. Meanwhile, the few reinsurers that remain have suffered enormous losses and are still in...