What’s New: In Brief (April 17, 2008)

John McGlynn, president and CEO of Kingsway General Insurance Company, accepted Toronto Insurance Women’s Association (TIWA)’s Patron of the Year Award.
Kingsway was recognized for encouraging the personal and professional growth of its employees and supporting the common good of society through TIWA.

Munich Re lost 166 million (Cdn$266.9 million) through write-downs and losses on disposal of subprime US mortgage loans, Nikolaus von Bomhard, Munich Re’s chairman of the board of management, noted at the company’s annual general meeting on Apr. 17.
The figure was quoted at an earlier stage and did not require revision.
While it is a admittedly a great deal of money, von Bomhard said, it represents less than 0.1% of the total investment volume and is “thus bearable.”
Even before the subprime crisis, Munich Re “had a healthy scepticism towards structured and extremely complex financial products that would set off loss avalanches if the assumptions underlying the modelling proved wrong,” von Bomhard said in his speech.
“We would have liked to include more credit risks in our investment portfolio, but not with the low risk spreads paid on the markets up to 2007. We therefore deliberately held back.”