Where To Buy Ultimate Risk: The Inside Story of the Lloyd's Catastrophe

Over All Rating Reviews :

If you work in the liability insurance industry, this book provides an interesting history of lessons (to put it mildly) that industry learned not too long ago.

This British author organized his account well. The introduction makes the reader care about this exclusive and centuries old world of wealth that went terribly wrong. The chapters on the history of Lloyds should intrigue fans of history, economics, business and the like. The reader has good reason to feel confidence almost pride about the human achievement Lloyd's has come to stand for.

Then Lloyd's players push the envelope with under the table practices a la Enron. Risks are transferred, reinsured, sent offshore, and so on until *cue Jaws music* Lloyd's develops cracks.

Then the asbestos liability debacle happens, which the author describes well. This ancient material, asbestos, suddenly began killing and injuring masses of people who turned to the Brits for help. Mass asbestos liability caught Lloyd's by surprise during a time of Enron-flavored vulnerabilities.

Then the environmental liability debacle happens. Suddenly companies were ordered to clean up America in the amount of billions. This too caught Lloyd's by surprise on its "lunch breaks" from dealing with the other problems.

Lloyd's somehow kept itself intact, though many of its individual financers were not so lucky. A weakness of the book is that it causes the reader to want a solution to the desperate failures of Lloyd's. Ultimately, Lloyd's solved its problems. The author provides some remakrs about this solution, but with less clarity and depth than the rest of the book. The author seems to believe that after describing the problems and consequences, his work is done. Although the problems that plagued Lloyd's and the consequences are the real story, I was hungry for an explanation of how Lloyd's has changed for the better and instilled confidence in the insurance markets.

Risky Business is a similar book on this topic. Risky Business did a better job of placing the reader into the luxury and pomp of being a Name, that is, an individual who actually provides the money to back Lloyd's insurance products. Risky Business also provided a better moment by moment account of some of the major legal battles involving Lloyd's, impoverished Names and others. This book was better organized than Risky Business. Start with this book, then read Risky Business.

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