But people who have had the chance to be insured -- if you're working in an auto business, for instance, the companies carry insurance; they insure all their employees -- you look at the circumstances that exist.
Roemer (1985) argues that if individuals maximize their expected utility on the insurance market, they insure against states in which they have low marginal utility.
Monoline insurers do a straightforward job: they insure securities — guaranteeing, for instance, that if a bond defaults they'll cover the interest and the principal.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was thought to be self-funded by the institutions whose deposits they insure, but they, too, underpriced the insurance by taking a backward-looking approach to funding.
This is because of a peculiar feature of bond insurance: insurers' credit ratings get automatically applied to any bond they insure.
As long as private insurers are allowed to pick whom they insure, there can be no universal health care system.
"Until the crisis, people wouldn't have considered insurance underwriters to be key stakeholders, but they insure aircraft engines, so if they are not prepared to offer cover, planes do not fly.
Car insurance companies make money when the drivers they insure don't have accidents.
Yet that is exactly what some insurance companies and other investors are doing when they insure bank loans, bonds and other corporate debt.They know little or nothing about the borrowers, sometimes not even their names.
Contact each insurance provider on your list and ask if they insure historic cars.
Banks and Wall Street firms could face tens of billions of dollars in additional write-downs on their insured subprime holdings because when an insurer weakens, so does the value of the securities they insure.
