"HN’s incredulity about insurance companies routinely paying out claims staggers the imagination. They’re highly regulated publicly traded companies which denom

"HN’s incredulity about insurance companies routinely paying out claims staggers the imagination. They’re highly regulated publicly traded companies which denominated claims expenses in (in this case) billions of dollars;" I used to use the "smart money" heuristic a lot in my thinking - for all of the reasons you list above, and more. Then the 2007/2008/2009 mortgage meltdown and liquidity crisis occurred and we saw that a lot of the "smart money", including the very insurance providers and investment banks (or subsidiaries thereof) were caught unawares. AIG[1], for instance, which was in very much the same league as Zurich RE, et. al. I would take the size of these companies, and the billions at stake, and their regulators ... and all of it ... with a big grain of salt. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_International_Group#Liquidity_crisis_and_government_bailout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_International_Group#L...