Shirley Beglinger is one of the City’s most respected insurance practitioners, specialising in all types of financial institutions underwriting (and in the intricacies of Basel 2). Until recently, she was a managing director at Swiss Re; now, she is free to say what she thinks about the regulatory morass that the FSA is taking on when it clutches insurance to its bosom in January.

This is a timely report, given how deep Eliot Spitzer now has his teeth into the US insurers – and the implausibility of the assumption that things are much different over here. It is also timely as a warning to UK regulators. Shirley believes that their optimistic assumption that the risk-weighted capital regime they are applying to banks (known colloquially as Basel 2) will carry over to insurance is unwarranted. The parallels with banking are nothing like as powerful as regulators seem to believe.