Since the 17th century, insurance agents have been the foremost experts on risk.
The Treasury's plan has little for those outside of the financial industry. It is aimed at rescuing the same financial institutions that created this crisis with the sloppy underwriting and reckless disregard for the risk they were creating, taking or passing on to others.
My dad was in the life insurance business, so I learned about selling when I was about 14 because I started working as a secretary.
While Wall Street firms typically underwrite offerings in teams, the lead underwriter, or manager, of the offering has primary responsibility for selling the offering and reaps much of the fees and profit.
When you're working in public radio, you don't have any money to advertise.
The biggest profit center for investment banks is the hefty fees they charge for underwriting stock offerings and giving financial advice, and analysts put those profits at risk if they publish negative conclusions about the companies that pay the fees.
You go public because you want access to capital in the form of debt and equity.
What the insurance companies have done is to reverse the business so that the public at large insures the insurance companies.
For some reason, I have always had a really good ability to write children in a way that's realistic but not annoying. The key to that is underwriting them: peel back the dialogue and keep it simple.
In 1688, Edward Lloyd opened a coffeehouse on London's seafront popular among underwriters, men in powdered wigs with mathematical minds and steely constitutions who offered to compensate owners if their boats were lost at sea.
For decades, Wall Street has charged companies a standard fee of 7 percent to sell their shares to the public.
An IPO is like a negotiated transaction - the seller chooses when to come public - and it's unlikely to be a time that's favourable to you.
I prefer to underwrite. Simple, clear as a country creek.
The way we finance homes in this country is slow, filled with middlemen, who run a nonstandardized evaluation process. This makes financing a home cumbersome and difficult.
We took Infosys public. That was a nonstop three-week global roadshow.
Insurance companies don't make anything.
Brokerage firms and their executives cannot use threats regarding research activities as a way to obtain investment banking business. The threat to drop research coverage if Piper were not selected as the lead underwriter for a secondary offering was totally inappropriate and undermines the integrity of the market.
Facts are, insurance ratings are really dependent on the notion that some people are higher risk than others.
You got to die of something because if you die of nothing, they won't pay your insurance.
I think going public is a really smart thing to do.
