Underwritten Weekly

You remember reading it, don’t you?
I’m sure I wrote it. Hang on, I’ll check.

Yes, we were right – here it is in black and white: “There will be no Sunday Nonsense for the next two weeks”. Clear as day.

Yet with the celestial inevitably of Edward Lloyd opening a coffee shop, this email certainly seems to be pointing strongly toward nonsense, and it IS a Sunday. Misdirection has always been a key device of The Nonsense since the very first one, so I don’t feel this one’s entirely on me if you took me literally.

I’m here in Morocco with my other half. Her work has links to the insurance sector, so you can only imagine the intensity of our pillow talk. I always knew I’d write this week’s Nonsense, because she was clear she needed to do a ‘Media Day’ while we were here, so while she’s giving interviews to Bloomberg, The Financial Times and The Wall St Journal: I’m writing The Nonsense.

One of us is winning in our careers. She’s going to be so upset when she realises it’s me.

She’s also a subscriber to The Nonsense, so that gag could backfire, but it was a good one, so in a room, sadly not the room, at Riu Tikida Garden in Marrakesh, I saw the risk, I wrote the line.

Anyway. Let me tell you about the first time Lloyd’s went to space.

In 1984, two commercial satellites were launched into entirely the wrong orbit. Not slightly wrong. Not “a bit off, we can probably work with this” wrong. Catastrophically, expensively, uselessly wrong. As debuts go, it was not ideal.

Both were insured at Lloyd’s. The market paid out.

Then someone opened a spreadsheet, ran their finger down the assets column, and noticed something.

Lloyd’s had paid for the satellites, Lloyd’s now owned the satellites.

Two satellites. In space. In the wrong orbit. Belonging, in the eyes of insurance law, to a market based in a rather more modest building on Lime Street than the one we know and love today, whose members had been underwriting risk since the reign of William III and had not, until this precise moment, been required to maintain an inventory of assets in low Earth orbit.

Most organisations, at this point, would write them off.

Lloyd’s didn’t. Lloyd’s went and got their own damn space shuttle, and they sent it into orbit to get them back. The first ever commercial space mission.

Astronauts physically retrieved both satellites, brought them back to Earth, where Lloyd’s had them refurbished, sold on, and relaunched. Lloyd’s made its money back.

I will just briefly note that the decision to send humans into space to collect insurance assets is one that I find enormously revealing about the character of this market. There was a meeting. In that meeting, someone said the words “we should probably go and get them”, everyone agreed, then they went and got them.

Nobody thinks about insurance when they think about space exploration. They think about engineers and rocket fuel and visionaries like Buzz Aldrin. They think about the countdown. The ignition. The moment something the size of a skyscraper decides to leave the planet.

They do not think about insurance.

But nothing leaves the ground without it.

The physics can be perfect. The rocket can be ready. If nobody will write the risk, it stays on the pad. The space industry tells its story through founders and engineers and people who appear on magazine covers looking purposeful next to large vehicles.

The actual gating function is The Room.

A market that, when it found itself in possession of two satellites in the wrong orbit, didn’t shrug.

It sent a space shuttle to go and get them. I can’t find a photo of it, but in my mind’s eye it has our market’s branding on both of the wing, and big grabby claws on the front.

Have a good week.

Rob

P.S. There won’t be a Sunday Nonsense next week. Or there might be. At this point neither of us know.