So what event followed these elaborate precautions and risk scenarios? A good old fashioned wind storm in the Gulf of Mexico which made a sizeable indent into the loss reserves of port risk insurers. Accordingly, this time all eyes are fastened on risk aggregation, catastrophe maps and aggregate limits.

It must be said,whenever the marine and transport disaster scenario planners have gathered in recent decades they have tended to imagine as their worst possible scenarios three events: Two planes colliding over Manhattan, phenomenal high tides in  the Gulf of Texas and a large earthquake event on the West Coast.

Since 50¢ in every dollar spend on insurance in this  world is spent in the US, you can see why these gloomy exercises tend to have an American theme. And you can also see how two out of three of these  events have happened in less than a decade with the industry merely wobbling a bit – some kind of testimony to the financial engineers of our times.

But the truth also is that in the war against General Fortuity, we underwriters are so often the poor old sloggers who tend to face unpleasant surprises whenever we put our heads above the parapet.