Sunday, October 22, 2006

Warren Buffett and Lloyd’s of London

“I don’t think we can make a killing,” Mr. Buffett said in an interview yesterday. “We could take a big loss. Nobody knows in this kind of thing. We’re taking on everything Lloyd’s wrote before 1992.

Lloyd’s, a collection of 66 insurance companies known as syndicates that was started by Edward Lloyd in his coffee house overlooking the Thames River in 1688, went into a tailspin in the late 1980’s as it faced enormous claims for man-made and natural disasters. Annual losses reached a peak of $12 billion in 1992. It has been profitable since 2002, except for a modest loss of more than $100 million from hurricanes and other catastrophes in 2005.

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