Declarations

Slow and Uneven

“We will not wake up one morning and say thank goodness this crisis is over. It will be slow. It will be uneven. It will be two steps forward and one step back. That’s how recoveries are.”

—Dr. Robert Hartwig, president of the Insurance Information Institute, projects the property and casualty insurance industry will be smaller, in dollar terms, once the current financial crisis is corrected. The industry will be about 3 percent to 7 percent smaller, accounting for inflation, Hartwig told agents at an industry event in Texas. The weak economy is not entirely responsible for the reduction. “It’s also because this economic downturn happened to be coincident with the soft market,” he said.