SHARE:
2009 Industry Outlook
Banking & Finance 2009
'The Good Years in Banking are Over': Financial institutions will be watching pennies as the industry shakeout lingers.
VC: Very Cautious
 Venture capitalist Craig Burson: ‘The IPO market is essentially dead.’ |
Rate Rise on the Home Front
Property insurance rates, kept artificially low by state law for customers of state-subsidized Citizens Property Insurance and for private company customers by below-market backup insurance, will be rising in 2009. After Gov. Charlie Crist and the Florida Cabinet saw that the state’s catastrophe fund — the backup insurer for Citizens and private sector property insurers — wouldn’t have been able to sell enough bonds to meet its obligations in the event of a monster storm because of the credit crisis in 2008, some shifting back of the risk to more expensive private reinsurers seems inevitable. “It will probably be more expensive than the state was able to sell (CAT fund reinsurance). The way the state has been dealing with this has been not allowing private companies or Citizens to pass along the cost of reinsurance in rates,” says Gary Landry, vice president of the Florida Insurance Council, an industry group.
