I received a number of calls recently from colleagues, including a couple of former NY insurance department employees, asking if I had seen the new report card on the effectiveness of each of the state insurance departments. Usually the conversation started out by the caller noting that California received an “F” and NY a “D”. […]
“An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.” Edwin Land At this time of year we are bombarded by images of Mother Nature at her most traumatic and beautiful moments. Blizzards and ice storms mixed with bucolic and tranquil winterscapes. One of the more iconic seasonal images is of a youngster so […]
New York life insurance and annuity beneficiaries can breath easier! They are safe again! Two years after the statutory life guaranty fund was exhausted by the Executive Life Insurance Company of New York failure, the State’s legislature has passed and the Governor has signed into law legislation restoring the viability of the fund. The new […]
Regulators are people too! I spend a lot of focus in this column on problems with excessive, pointless, redundant and counter-productive insurance laws and regulations. In the process, however, many of those individuals responsible for interpreting and enforcing the rules are often unintentionally caught in the crossfire. So I want to take a moment to […]
Shame on AIG! It has now joined the growing list of insurance companies in NY that have agreed to pay substantial fines for their sins. These are not the fines of our predecessor administrations, where the largest fines were in the hundreds of thousands. No, now we are talking about fines in the tens of […]
The year 1984 has significance on so many fronts but none greater than its import regarding access to information. Contrast 1984 as George Orwell’s target year in his futuristic classic about subverting control over all communications through “Big Brother,” with 1984 as the year the first Macintosh computer was introduced and the dawning of the […]
Welcome to my 50th Insight Column! I guess that makes it some kind of golden anniversary. But I look at it more as having been provided with a golden opportunity. For the past two and a half years my column has been addressing the natural tension between insurance regulators and regulatees, particularly where regulated entities […]
[INSIGHT ] By Peter H. Bickford Controlling Information It has been almost twenty years since Seinfeld’s mailman Newman uttered that threat and, even with the passage of time and the ensuing digital age, it is still a timeless reminder of the importance of availability and access to information. Even today with seemingly unfettered access to […]
[INSIGHT ] By Peter H. Bickford Who says the art of letter writing is dead? In this age of smart phones, instant messaging, initials in place of sentences, and the general demise of the printed word, it is quite refreshing to see at least one regulator that seems to relish the written word and […]
It started over a year ago, in a speech before a prestigious conference on the state of the U.S. and world economies, when New York’s Superintendent of Financial Services first raised the warning signs against private equity firms “becoming active in the acquisition of insurance companies” because “these private equity firms are more short-term focused – when [insurance] is a business that’s all about the long haul.” Since issuing this warning shot, the issue of hedge funds and private equity firms investing in the insurance business has become a topic of significant discussion and some action.
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