The market will harden--eventually--but a cycle turn is not in the cards for 2010, according to the consensus view of NAPSLO members attending the Mid-Year Leadership Forum who shared their views with NU's E&S/Specialty Lines Extra.

We have a higher cost of capital because we're in a volatile class," he said, referring to the heavy weighting of the company's business in catastrophe lines.

More than $17 billion of capital washed up on the Bermuda shores in 2009, as underwriting profits and investment recoveries for a group of insurers and reinsurers erased a $10 billion capital drop for 2008.

Two Bermuda-based companies, Max Capital Group and Harbor Point Ltd., agreed to merge last week, creating a global insurance and reinsurance enterprise with total capital of $3 billion.

One of the featured speakers at the NAPSLO Mid-Year Leadership Forum was familiar to many members attending the Friday morning session, but according to Tony Markel, the company he led for decades looks entirely different in 2010.

The market will harden--eventually--but a cycle turn is not in the cards for 2010, according to the consensus view of NAPSLO members attending the Mid-Year Leadership Forum who shared their views with NAPSLO Daily.

Last summer, NAPSLO and the Minneapolis-based Professional Liability Underwriting Society announced they were setting up an education partnership between the two associations, but exactly what does that mean for NAPSLO members?

"Recession 101: It's A Test. Not The Final." That is the message posted on billboards across the nation by a person who has been identified only as an "unknown optimist" in media reports.