Inadequate cover

By Francesco Guerrera in New York and Andrea Felsted in London Soon after the historic visit by Richard Nixon to Mao Zedong’s China in 1972, Ron Shelp, a senior employee at American International Group, was summoned to Hank Greenberg’s office. The chief executive of the insurance giant, which had started as a Shanghai-based underwriting agency before being kicked out by the communist regime, had a simple message to convey. “Nixon has opened up China,” Mr Shelp recalls him as saying. “I wanna go back, Ron, I wanna go back first.” Throughout more than three decades at the top of AIG, Mr Greenberg, a D-Day and Korean war veteran, showed an uncompromising desire to be first. At its apogee, AIG had nearly $1,000bn in assets, made $14bn in annual net profits and employed 106,000 people in 130 countries. Today, three years after Mr... [read full story]