Newsletter Sign-up

Nuke power is in. New nuclear power plants are in the works, and existing facilities are now being allowed to run past their previous license periods ... sometimes 20 years past it. The author here wonders if this is a good thing, considering some recent mishaps at U.S. nuclear plants.

Wow, here we were thinking that cybercriminals were super sophisticated, high-tech masterminds. Then along comes this fella with a scheme to extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from a New York (unnamed) insurance company. Check out the highlights of his "ransom" note, with such lines as, "My demand is now for $198,303.88. This amount is NOT negotiable, you had your chance to make me an offer, now I call the shots."

AIG has sold its major international life insurance units to Pru and now MetLife in the last week. These are the operations Hank Greenberg referred to as the "crown jewel" of AIG. Here, Bloomberg adds an interesting timeline to the story, starting from 1919, when Cornelius Vander Starr founded American Asiatic Underwriters in Shanghai, through the March 8 MetLife announcement about Alico.

Like most any commercial insurance niches out there, the space insurance market is soft ... perhaps dangerously so. Underwriters have increased capacity for satellite launches and lowered rates. The business is also attracting new entrants, underwriters who perhaps know less about what they're doing and write even cheaper rates. You know what happens next, right?

Fireman's Fund is one of the biggest insurers in Hollywood. Every year, around this Oscar time, the firm releases its list of the riskiest movies of the past year. This year's "winners" are 2012, Inglorious Basterds, Nine and Crazy Heart, to name a few.

The New York Times received an advanced copy of the first book about Eliot Spitzer's governorship, Lloyd Constantine's "Journal of the Plague Year" (which is due in bookstores next week). Constantine was a senior advisor to Spitzer and long-time friend. The book's already got people in an uproar, including Spitzer himself and New York AG Andrew Cuomo, whose "Troopergate" investigation Constantine criticizes.

You don't have to be from Ohio to remember the Coingate scandal, when Tom Noe helped to lose millions upon millions of dollars in investments for the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensationdue through dubious investments in rare coins. Now Noe is behind bars for 18 years, but pleading his innocence during a TV interview with a local Toledo channel.

Somebody had a camera rolling when the Louis Majesty, a Mediterranean cruiseship with 1,350 passengers on board, was hit by a series of 30-foot waves. Two people were killed, 14 injured. The ship was off of Marseilles, France, when the rogue waves struck.

Between the massive magnitude 8.8 quake, the resulting local tsunami and the continued effects of infrastructure damage, the human suffering and economic costs of the Chilean catastrophe are immense. There will be plenty of individual stories and news angles coming out of Chile for weeks. Here's one, a look at one of the commercial sectors hit hardest: the Chilean wine business.

Here is one intriguing, good read about the nature of risk inherent in the recently ended Winter Olympics, and our understanding and appreciation as a society for those risks, and of risk in general. Essentially, the author argues that Americans love risky behavior but hate the consequences ... that we're risk-averse voyeurs but don't know it.

The Oracle of Omaha's local paper prides itself on some of the more in-depth coverage of his annual, much-anticipated letter to Berkshire shareholders, which was published on Saturday. Here, you'll find talk about how he lambasted financial services' risk management, about potential future Berkshire acquisitions and a link to the actual letter so you can make up your own mind what Warren is trying to say.

This New York Times' blog entry links to a collection of footage from Chile during and after this weekend's massive quake, as well as to resources and up-to-the-minute accounts online.

AIG just reported an 86 percent drop in 4Q 2009 net losses, but perhaps more importantly for the New York Fed, the parent company of Chartis Insurance has announced a change in the way it plans to pay back the $8.5 billion it owes. Instead of leaning on cash from its life insurance operations, AIG will use cash from insurance units and from sales of some of its assets.

New provisions in the Maine workers' comp law, meant to ensure that contractors were not mislabeling employees as independent contractors, has construction folks peeved and worried about increased premiums and fines. The rule sets a new legal definition for construction subcontractors. Now, it's up to subcontractors to prove they are not employees of the contractor.

This piece from American Banker magazine, care of the blog Bank Investment Consultant, talks about how banking CROs now need, and want, to have a direct connection to not just the CEO, but the board and risk committee as well. And boards now aren't just leaning on CROs. A new best practice is for them to talk directly to business heads about risk.