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E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
464 Seiten
Englisch
C.H. Beckerschienen am27.10.20161. Auflage
'Reinsurance has to be international in accordance with its nature.' This is the well-known viewpoint of Carl von Thieme, one of the founders of Munich Re, who also served as its general director for many years. Thus, it was not a coincidence that the company rose to become the world market leader rather quickly after its founding in 1880. In the following period, Munich Re stayed on top or was occasionally second to Swiss Re. Nonetheless, the broader public does not know much about the company. Johannes Bähr and Christopher Kopper now present the first history of the reinsurer from its beginnings into the 1980s. Few companies have risen to become world market leaders as quickly as Munich Re, and only the fewest have succeeded in remaining at the top of the world market for as long. The company's history reveals how insurers reacted to major catastrophes and technological shifts. Without sharing risks with reinsurers, countless direct insurers would not have survived the economic consequences of major natural catastrophes and would have been forced into bankruptcy by the weight of their payment obligations. Consequently, reinsurers even made coverage for some risks possible in the first place. Yet Munich Re itself also repeatedly contributed to the introduction of new segments of insurance, such as in the case of machine insurance or high-risk life insurance. Thus, the history of this pioneer of globalization is, at the same time, a history of dealing with risks and managing the distribution of risk. Last but not least, it is also the history of a German company that profited from the National Socialist dictatorship and, with great effort, had to find its way back into the world market after the two world wars.


Johannes Bähr ist apl. Professor an der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. Christopher Kopper ist apl. Professor an der Universität Bielefeld.mehr
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Klappentext'Reinsurance has to be international in accordance with its nature.' This is the well-known viewpoint of Carl von Thieme, one of the founders of Munich Re, who also served as its general director for many years. Thus, it was not a coincidence that the company rose to become the world market leader rather quickly after its founding in 1880. In the following period, Munich Re stayed on top or was occasionally second to Swiss Re. Nonetheless, the broader public does not know much about the company. Johannes Bähr and Christopher Kopper now present the first history of the reinsurer from its beginnings into the 1980s. Few companies have risen to become world market leaders as quickly as Munich Re, and only the fewest have succeeded in remaining at the top of the world market for as long. The company's history reveals how insurers reacted to major catastrophes and technological shifts. Without sharing risks with reinsurers, countless direct insurers would not have survived the economic consequences of major natural catastrophes and would have been forced into bankruptcy by the weight of their payment obligations. Consequently, reinsurers even made coverage for some risks possible in the first place. Yet Munich Re itself also repeatedly contributed to the introduction of new segments of insurance, such as in the case of machine insurance or high-risk life insurance. Thus, the history of this pioneer of globalization is, at the same time, a history of dealing with risks and managing the distribution of risk. Last but not least, it is also the history of a German company that profited from the National Socialist dictatorship and, with great effort, had to find its way back into the world market after the two world wars.


Johannes Bähr ist apl. Professor an der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. Christopher Kopper ist apl. Professor an der Universität Bielefeld.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9783406698231
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
Verlag
Erscheinungsjahr2016
Erscheinungsdatum27.10.2016
Auflage1. Auflage
Seiten464 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse8522 Kbytes
Illustrationenwith 38 illustrations 2 diagrams and 10 tables
Artikel-Nr.2093146
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis
1;Cover;1
2;Title;3
3;About the Book;464
4;About the Authors;464
5;Copyright;4
6;Contents;5
7;1. Introduction;7
8;Part I: The Company´s Rise, Acid Tests, and Setbacks (1880-1932);13
8.1;2. The Beginnings of Reinsurance: The Long Path to Equality;15
8.2;3. Founding and Beginnings of Munich Re;24
8.2.1;Carl Thieme and the Founding of Munich Re;24
8.2.2;The Rise of a New Kind of Reinsurer;35
8.2.3; The Founding of a Casualty Firm along with Our Reinsurance Company : How Allianz Versicherungs-AG Came into Being;44
8.3;4. Conquering the World Market and the Earthquakeof San Francisco;55
8.3.1;Business Dealings and Investments in Russia, Great Britain, and the U.S.;55
8.3.2;The Earthquake of San Francisco and Other Major Losses;64
8.4;5. Munich Re before the First World War;78
8.4.1;Employees and Management;78
8.4.2;Business Development, Capital Investments, and New Insurance Segments;89
8.5;6. The First World War and the Restructuring of the World Market;95
8.6;7. Banned from the World Market: The Development of the Corporation in Central Europe during the Inflation Period;103
8.7;8. Insurance Has Its Own Economy : Munich Re in the Great Depression;125
9;Part II: Munich Re during the National Socialist Regime (1933-1945);145
9.1;9. The National Socialist Takeover and Munich Re: Business Development, Political Ties, and Management;147
9.2;10. Munich Re in the Economy of the Third Reich: Business Policy, Foreign Currency Restrictions, and Participation in Financing Armaments;176
9.3;11. Foreign Business, Foreign Investments, and the Expectation of War;191
9.3.1;Relations to Swiss Re under the Conditions of Foreign Exchange Control;191
9.3.2;The Phönix Scandal and Its Consequences;196
9.3.3;Disguises and Expectations of War;206
9.4;12. Occupation Rule and the War Economy: Munich Re in the Europe of the Third Reich;211
9.4.1; Prudent Cooperation ? The Company´s Involvement in Vienna, Prague, and Southeastern Europe;211
9.4.2;The Group Companies in Occupied Poland;221
9.4.3;The Subsidiaries in the West and the Association for the Coverage of Major Risks;229
9.4.4;The Hub of Masked Business and Window to the World: Union Rück in Zurich;237
10;Part III: Back to the Top of the World Market (1945-1980);245
10.1;13. Starting Anew under the American Occupation: The Consequences of War and Denazification;247
10.2;14. Finding a Way Back into the International Reinsurance Market;262
10.3;15. Rebuilding the Capital Basis: Munich Re and the Consequences of the Currency Reform;270
10.4;16. New Challenges in the International Reinsurance Business;279
10.5;17. Continuity and Change in the Alzheimer Era (1950-1968);304
10.6;18. The Progress of Globalization in the Reinsurance Business;313
10.7;19. The Crises of the 1970s and the Challenges ofModern Risk Management;350
10.8;20. Conclusion;362
11;Appendix;371
11.1;Notes;373
11.2;List of Tables and Diagrams, Picture Credits;438
11.3;List of Abbreviations;439
11.4;List of Primary Sources and Bibliography;441
11.5;Index of Persons;453
11.6;Index of Companies;457mehr
Leseprobe


1.Introduction


For over 100 years, they have played a major role in the insurance industry, but they are less familiar than the large general insurers. What we are talking about here are reinsurance companies. Founded in 1880, the Münchener Rückversicherungs-Gesellschaft AG (Münchener Rück) was the largest reinsurance firm in the world up to 1914, during the 1930s, and from the late 1960s, but the broader public seldom took notice of it. This was due, first of all, to its reserved press and public relations work, which the company limited for more than a century to the reporting of figures from its balance sheets. Secondly, lack of familiarity with the company derived from the nature of its business: reinsurers only enter into insurance contracts with the primary or direct insurers and insurance brokers. In contrast to direct insurers, they do not appear in the public eye through mass advertising and a visible sales network. Only against this backdrop does it make sense that Münchener Rück has been so silent in dealing with its own, significant history. This book, whose original German edition was published 135 years after the company´s founding, constitutes the first comprehensive company history of Münchener Rück, which has been called Munich Re worldwide since 2009 and thus will be referred to as such hereafter.

The economic function of reinsurers is not well known, either. Without sharing risks with reinsurers, countless direct insurers would not have survived the economic consequences of natural catastrophes like earthquakes and hurricanes and would have been forced into insolvency by the burden of their payment obligations. Reinsurance against events resulting in catastrophic damages made a concentration of high values in the form of residential and commercial buildings, machines and infrastructure possible in many states and in regions that tend to be hit regularly but unpredictably by natural catastrophes. Even in less spectacular business segments such as fire and motor insurance, the reinsurers evened out claims management for direct insurers and simplified the calculation of insurance premiums. This book will also address the question of whether and how reinsurers made insurance for specific risks possible in the first place.

This does not mean that the existence of independent reinsurance companies was functionally required and thus brooked no alternative. In Great Britain and the U.S., the task of sharing risk was not primarily handled by reinsurers but rather by cooperation among direct insurers in the form of joint insurance policies and insurance syndicates. The Lloyd´s insurance syndicate in London is the best-known example of this. At the same time, the information gap between the direct insurer and the reinsurer generated the latent danger of bad risks being transferred to the reinsurer. For this reason, this study looks into the means Munich Re used to reduce this information deficit and how it attempted to prevent one-sided risk transfers to its detriment in the way it formulated the policies. It shall investigate how the relationship between reinsurers and direct insurers was changed by shifts in economic performance, new risk-assessment techniques, and new forms of cooperation.

Particular attention will be paid to the evolution of scientific risk assessment. Whereas the assessment of insurance risks was based on experiential knowledge into the 1960s and risks were quantified by means of comparatively simple statistical (actuarial) methods, Munich Re shifted to forward-looking and scientifically-based risk assessment earlier than many competitors. Above all, it grounded the assessment of georisks like earthquakes and storms in natural science, and in the 1970s, it introduced mathematical models for risk assessment in the property insurance segment.

For various reasons, hardly any reinsurance company is more suited to a long-term study than Munich Re. Munich Re founded Allianz Versicherungs-AG in 1890 and enabled this company, with a high rate of reinsurance, to become by far the largest direct insurer of Germany. Yet the relationship between the two companies was by no means static. Through its increasing size and financial strength, Allianz was able to adjust its relationship to Munich Re and reinsure smaller portions of its business. Still, Munich Re´s close tie to the largest German direct insurer generated a considerable volume of premiums, which promoted its growth. The close cooperation between Munich Re and Allianz was regulated by means of an association agreement and was also created through mutual capital holdings (crossholdings). Each insurance company had representatives on the supervisory board of the other, generating a close intertwining of personnel that lasted until the association agreement was dissolved in 2003.

Using the examples of subsidiaries MR held in common with Allianz and its own capital stocks in direct insurers, this book pursues the question of the means MR used to secure long-term ties. In addition to its capital assets, its well-endowed reserves, and its reputation as a competent and productive insurer, Munich Re´s capital investments in direct insurers served as an instrument of customer loyalty that is worthy of systematic analysis. In this context, this study is dedicated to the question of whether Munich Re as a (co-)owner of other companies aimed to improve short-term yields or whether it concentrated on a longer-term ownership strategy as a typical stockholder in the economic order of Rhenish Capitalism (Michel Albert).

Reinsurers differentiated themselves from direct insurers early on with their much higher proportion of foreign business. The spatial distribution of the reinsurance business across more than one continent was not primarily due to the fact that even a large, national insurance market like Germany quickly became too small for an expansive business strategy. The transcontinental spatial distribution of insured risks served, above all, as a means of balancing regional risks and as protection against a possible spatial accumulation of risks. There were few barriers to internationalization. In contrast to the direct insurance industry, a reinsurer did not need authorization from the national regulatory body for insurance nor a costly sales network. Thus, Munich Re managed even before 1900 to extend its business from its core area of continental Europe (above all, the German Reich and Austria-Hungary) across the Atlantic to North America, the largest growth market of this era.

With the great earthquake of San Francisco in 1906, Munich Re was confronted, for the first time, with great risks that did not exist in its European business. Consequently, the history of Munich Re is almost a textbook history of globalization up to the beginning of the First World War (1914). The forced disintegration of the world market resulted from this war. With the military expansion of the Third Reich, Munich Re came to dominate the European reinsurance industry, but this ended when all of its foreign assets were seized and Munich Re was prohibited from engaging in foreign business. In the 1950s, Munich Re managed to internationalize once again. Since the Asian and North American markets became increasingly important, this could rightly be called globalization. By the end of the 1970s, Munich Re had established business relations with insurers in almost all the countries of the world. The globalization of the reinsurance business compelled the company early on to push the limits of what was insurable. Munich Re had initially treated earthquake and flood losses as incalculable and thus uninsurable risks. After Munich Re entered the U.S. and Japanese markets, it had to adapt to the conventions of these insurance markets and reinsure these risks. This proved to be a catalyst for the scientific understanding and assessment of risks.

The First and Second World Wars resulted in the loss of a considerable portion or even all of the company´s foreign assets and pushed Munich Re back to the area of the German Reich, its allies, and neutral states. The shift in the political regime from the Weimar Republic to National Socialist rule was associated with the transition to a rigid autark policy. The extensive chapter on Munich Re during the National Socialist era deals, among other things, with the question of to extent to which National Socialist economic policy restricted options in the international reinsurance business and...

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Autor

Johannes Bähr ist apl. Professor an der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. Christopher Kopper ist apl. Professor an der Universität Bielefeld.
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