Declarations

No Warren Buffett

“The heart and soul of what insurance companies should be is underwriting companies. I mean, I tell people there’s only one Warren Buffett, and I’m not him.”

—Fred Eppinger, CEO of Worcester, Mass.-based The Hanover Insurance Group, noting that insurance companies are going to have to get accustomed to lower returns on their investments and get better at making money on underwriting. “Insurance companies lose their way when they think they’re investment companies,” he told Insurance Journal.

Take It or Leave It

“We have been duped into thinking that these AIG employees have some kind of secret code that no other employee could discover if they were hired to replace them and therefore they are able to basically hold the company ransom.”

—Cornelius Hurley, director of the Morin Center for Banking and Financial Law at Boston University, saying no AIG employee is irreplaceable. Anastasia Kelly, AIG’s vice chairman for legal, human resources, corporate affairs and corporate communications, resigned Dec. 30, 2009, reportedly because of pay curbs imposed by the Obama Administration. Kenneth Feinberg. (Reuters)

Gotcha!

“Our members are concerned that the department is shifting its focus from compliance assistance back to more of the ‘gotcha’ or aggressive enforcement first approach.”

—Karen Harned, executive director of the National Federation of Independent Business’ small business legal center, criticizing the approach of the Department of Labor, under President Obama, in pursuing safety, overtime and other workplace issues against businesses.
Opportunities Exhausted?

“Just about every major financial firm that can be sued has been, so we’ve run out of inventory.”

—Joseph Grundfest, a former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission commissioner who oversees Stanford Law’s Securities Class Action Clearinghouse, commenting on the dip in securities fraud lawsuits in 2009 as stocks rose and the credit crisis eased. Investors filed 169 prospective securities class-action lawsuits last year, a 24 percent decrease from the prior year.
Growth Predicted

“As we move into 2010, it’s safe to say that the property/casualty reinsurance market has weathered the global financial crisis and emerged in a relatively strong position, with abundant capital and ample capacity for most lines of business.”

—Chris Klein, global head of business intelligence at Guy Carpenter, which just released a new report showing a decline in reinsurance rates as of the Jan. 1 renewal.