Florida’s Citizens Property Insurance Corp. can now breath a major sigh of relief, as Tropical Storm Isaac delivered just a glancing blow to South Florida and the Keys before making its way out into the Gulf of Mexico’s warm open …

According to its official tourism marketing corporation, the State of Florida welcomed 87.3 million visitors in 2011, whose $67.2 billion of spending generated nearly a quarter of the state’s sales tax revenue. As the nation’s most important locus for travel, …

Texas Insurance Commissioner Eleanor Kitzman is hearing an earful from the coastal community as she listens to residents’ concerns in the Corpus Christi area. Coastal occupants are complaining about the cost of windstorm insurance policies provided by the Texas Windstorm …

That headline comes us by way of “Grandpa” Straub, a farmer from Fairbury, Ill. who also serves as the star of the latest edition of National Public Radio’s always excellent Planet Money podcast. Amid a worst-in-a-generation drought that has seen …

I’ve just returned from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ summer meetings in Atlanta, where the big news was the announcement of NAIC CEO Terri Vaughan’s pending departure from the regulators group. Vaughan’s stated reasons for stepping down early next …

The California Earthquake Authority, which has been lobbying Congress to establish a federal backstop to its debt financing, is proving once again that it can do plenty fine on its own. The quasi-public agency just completed its third catastrophe bond …

A friend involved in the crop insurance industry recently wrote to me taking issue with a reference I had made proposed shallow loss “insurance” (my words) program in the farm bill currently pending before Congress. My friend pointed out that …

Albert Einstein once said “a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.” Or, as it often paraphrased, we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created …

There was a time, not so far in the distant past, when virtually all property and casualty insurance rates were calculated by industry-owned rate bureaus. It wasn’t necessarily a terrible system. Smaller insurers could compete on relatively even ground with …

I’m in New Orleans at a conference on Preparing the Gulf Coast for Extreme Weather. Its lead sponsor is a reinsurer, the Institute for Building and Home Safety is here, and there are lots of insurance people around. The preponderance …