The 18th century was a formative one in the history of insurance. In Britain in particular, insurance was increasingly being sold by specialized firms, rather than by underwriters operating independently or in syndicates. In this way and others, over the course of the century, the industry developed to become more recognizable to modern eyes. In…
Among the most dramatic and controversial economic transformations pursued in any country was that launched in Chile after the 1973 coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power. The civilian administrators he entrusted with the nation’s economy went about turning it into a neoliberal experiment. Their reforms included a restructuring of the country’s dated pension…
Insurance is easily imagined as a stable and delightfully boring industry but it is hardly so, certainly for property & casualty insurers who stand exposed to extreme events, natural or man-made, threatening them constantly with the threat of losses. Surely life insurance would be a calmer business. However, that industry too is still exposed to…
Projects of immediate national significance, even when privately owned, are infrequently left to their own management and their own devices. Acceptance of government regulation in exchange for subsidies or other concessions usually constitutes the manner in which such projects get off the ground, especially for those that attempt something never done before. Private entrepreneurship, critical…
Lloyd’s of London, one of the oldest continuously operating financial institutions around, faced profound troubles just thirty years ago, financial challenges that threatened to discredit or destroy it. The eyes of its regulators, customers, and thousands of member underwriters were on Lloyd’s. In recent years, banking firms in distress have created ‘bad banks’ to separate…
Colonial America was not awash in corporate entities of any kind; no country was. However, one of the oldest corporations in America, one even older than the Unites States itself, was also among the first life insurance firms in the world. The establishment of the Presbyterian Ministers’ Fund is a significant event in the history…
Favorable laws and institutions along with innovative practices helped put Britain at the forefront of the world insurance business for centuries. However, when it came to reinsurance, the British were sitting on the sidelines while the industry was thriving in Germany. As with many other historic changes in insurance, the birth of reinsurance resulted from…
Over three centuries ago, Britain had just overtaken Italy to be the center of the world’s insurance trade and it nearly came crashing down. At the time, marine insurance was the largest insurance sector; it was virtually synonymous with insurance itself. The dominance of London’s insurers almost led to ruin as many new underwriters complacently…
Life insurance and annuities have been around for centuries; in fact, basic burial insurance existed even in classical Rome. However, for the majority of this history, insurance contracts only existed as informal arrangements. Even in early modern Europe, though the lingo of modern insurance existed (there were underwriters at work, premiums paid, and indemnities claimed,…
For over a century, life annuities were sold as a means of financing government deficits. In the 18th century, the French state would sell these annuities to fund its wars in Europe and abroad, often at very generous implied interest rates. Though they experimented most with life annuities, in contrast to Britain’s perpetual consolidated annuities…
Life annuities have been used as a form of insurance for centuries. Insurance itself is one of the oldest financial services in existence. Its principles have not changed even if the nature of the products people buy have evolved. Yet there are two perspectives to all transactions; insurance contracts serve just as much a purpose…
Not all financial products attempt to turn a sum of money today into a larger one tomorrow. Even retail banking grew more out of a desire to protect what one had rather than to acquire more. However, the need for protection features more prominently in the story of insurance than of almost any other financial…
