Zilkens' News Blog

Zilkens' News Blog 40 2022

Yesterday we celebrated our German National Day of Celebration. 32 years ago, the 5 "new" federal states joined the territory of the Federal Republic of Germany. The celebrations were not exactly exuberant, but the autumn holidays were all the more so. Even a national Sunday newspaper, which is printed on Fridays and delivered on Saturdays, did not find the event worth mentioning. Yet there is much to be said about the effort to get used to each other. Politically, the two German halves do not exactly tick in the same direction, and economically certainly not - after all, the Treuhand understood how to stifle burgeoning small and medium-sized businesses at an early stage in the early 1990s. The Treuhand Insurance Service presented itself to the companies still belonging to the Treuhand as the owner's emissary and demanded the signature on the brokerage contract, which took the air out of the new insurance brokers in the East who were just starting out on their own and threw them back to the more modest private client business. And where did the THV colleagues come from? From the West, of course - and the scars are still in the collective memory today. Our administrative lawyer as Federal President also presents himself as righteous and brave - but nothing really comes across. A few minutes of Gauck are a thousand times more refreshing in the national psyche.

There are no art fairs this week, Paper Positions Hamburg (where they have been everywhere ...!) has just closed its doors. Next week you can do a bit of frizing in London before heading either to Paris for the next Art Basel offshoot or to the Munich highlights. Does anyone say anything about energy consumption and CO² ? No? - All the better ... .

Insurance companies have a hard time - no one really likes them, even though they belong to the hard core of the economy - at least when it comes to their role as capital investors. With risk bearing in the classical sense, it's one thing. For years, no one wanted to buy their policies for cyber insurance. - For those who always have everything in the cloud and feel safe: The cloud is like having your own server, just somewhere else and quite attractive for hackers - because honour and mammon beckon, preferably in Bitcoin, which still legally ekes out its questionable existence. In the insurance conditions, cyber is now excluded in addition to pandemic, regardless of whether it is a real risk or not. Some losses, however, are not covered even by cyber coverage, which, due to the catastrophic loss development last year with rates of over 160% for individual insurers, is now also becoming significantly more expensive and is certainly keeping pace with the increase in gas prices. The marine insurers are merciful, and on the association side they are also offering the reinsurance of cyber risk again. One fly in the ointment: damage caused by cyber attacks is limited to a maximum of EUR 1 million. The introduction of the clause is also being demanded by reinsurers - so pressure is building up. But how do the claims departments, which are completely detached from the product because of compliance, behave, whose bosses of all genders are partly motivated by the fact that their bonuses are measured by lower payments? Do they depart from the Causa Proxima principle (i.e. the proximate cause) in the case of a fire loss of more than 1 million euros if it turns out that the fire alarm system was put out of operation by a hacker attack and the pumps of the sprinkler system did not work because the electronic controls were disabled by nice little electronic viruses? Would there have been less to no fire at all if everything had been working? Is it now possible to construct grounds for denying claims from the delayed update of safety software? The industry, whose credibility is on the level of ordinary politicians, should consider very carefully whether these generally formulated exclusions and re-exclusions are suitable and reflect the insurance intent. Clarifying formulations are currently only conceded very hesitantly. What if a museum's alarm system is disrupted by hackers and third-party loans disappear? Does the museum that assumed full liability for the loan according to the loan agreement then pay?

Great joy in Tuscon, Arizona - the Willem de Kooning, stolen in 1985 and recovered in 2017, is back from the Getty, freshly restored, and can show itself to the public in all its beauty at the University of Arizona Museum of Art. The museum gladly accepts the increase in hidden reserves, since today one speaks of a value of over 100 million USD that one would have to raise on the art market for something comparable.

We wish you a rest of the week full of exciting encounters with life and art Your Stephan Zilkens and the team of Zilkens Fine Art Insurance Broker GmbH in Cologne and Solothurn