The best subtitle for this article would probably be, “New Horizons in Financial Underwriting!”  But first, let’s take a short break to capture a parent-child moment in a typical American home: Father: “Son, I want you to be good at school today.” Son: “I’ll be good if you give me five...

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander; or so we are told.  But adages aren’t always truisms, so unfortunately the conventional wisdom behind them must be applied categorically and with ginger – especially when building financial justification for a case.  The coverage guideline a carrier...

When discussing and designing executive bonus plans, too much time is lost talking about and describing “single bonus” and “double bonus” methods, and too many cases may be lost because they haven’t been discussed at all. Just a quick study of vanilla executive bonus: The employer, (ER) agrees...

During and after his tenure as President of Harvard University, Charles Eliot liked to contend that the essentials of a liberal education could be gotten by simply reading fifteen minutes a day from a selection of great books that would all fit on a five-foot shelf. If so, you wonder why people line...

Let’s talk about federal estate taxes.  Back in the old days the first spouse to die had to use the lifetime estate tax exemption at death or lose it. In the discussion that follows assume a $1,000,000 exemption where the husband dies first. If the husband left everything to the wife protected...

By the end of the story the pigs have begun to walk upright and they carry whips.  Promised improvement in conditions for other citizens have been forgotten.  And the Seven Commandments that were to serve as the foundation for the common democracy have been reduced to just one: All animals are equal,...

There are three maxims that every trial attorney takes into the courtroom when going before a jury: If you don’t have the facts, then pound on the law; If you don’t have the law, then pound on the facts; And if you don’t have either, then pound on the table. Among the three (the facts, the law or the table)...

Hope springs eternal in the human breast when even the Cheerios Kid can make a comeback.  With his sidekick Sue, he was an iconic mainstay in the ads for the General Mills cereal during the 50s and 60s before his cell-animated storylines were put out to pasture to make way for a wave of faster-paced,...

The title’s allusion to folk music is appropriate when you consider that the results achieved by exchanging coverage might be music to the ears of a lot of folks! Not since the “flight to quality” during the 1990s have there been conditions in the economy and the industry that could serve as such...