E&S/Specialty

While battles over health care reform got most of the headlines here this month, Congress tackled a host of other issues of keen interest to property and casualty insurers and producers.

Specialty insurer Markel Corp. said that its president and chief operating officer, Paul W. Springman, will resign his position to pursue other interests.

Back in January, a top broker said we were entering our "first 'invisible' hard market," with price hikes hidden by shrinking insurable exposures. NU Editor Sam Friedman examines how that prediction played out in his blog at www.NUSamSoapBox.com.

Was the stubbornly soft market, reform efforts on health care and financial services regulation or developments at AIG the biggest p&c news story of 2009? Go to www.property-casualty.com to respond to NU's Reader Poll.

Reinsurance and excess and surplus lines purchases would be governed by the tax policies, licensing and other requirements of the buyer's home state...

If there was a listing of individually initiated financial disasters, the depredations of Ponzi-schemer Bernard Madoff might rank at the top, but opinions may differ on how much of an insurance catastrophe he has created.

There has been a proliferation of Side-A-only insurance forms to cover directors and officers in recent years, but few know the history of the underlying coverage of the full D&O policy--a policy now more than seven decades old.

When Michael Turk, senior consultant for Towers Perrin, pulled together figures for his firm's annual directors and officers liability insurance survey back in 2007, something just didn't seem right.