they lose their best folks there’s no replacing them and that is a large complex business. Nobody can step in and fix it.
So time is their enemy. Whether it’s a billion dollars a month in interest payments or a loss of talent they’ve got to do something quickly. Because people will leave and customer confidence is something that they’re doing everything they can to hold on to and I think they’re doing a pretty good job in terms of their press and their PR. To Tony’s point, they’re aggressively focused on retaining renewals. Premium is like oxygen. Once the premium is cut you’re in a bad place. So they’re looking at a lot of things and it will continue to play out.
I’m not sure it’s even going to take to the second quarter next year. It could be soon.

McDONALD: Dan, anything to add? I know you touched on AIG in your earlier remarks.

RYAN: I just think it’s very important to bifurcate what’s going on at the holding company, which is AIG Inc. and what’s going on at the insurance company level. Now there are certainly different sets of issues. Certainly from the operations standpoint, everything that’s been discussed here is everything that we’ve been very mindful of, flight to quality as I talked about, the layering of some of the larger accounts that Chris has mentioned and certainly teams leaving.
These are all discussions that we’ve already had things that we’re mindful of over the course of time. I agree that a lot of what’s been mentioned here is certainly concern regarding to some extent the operations, the operation risk that Lex and other insurance companies in the AIG family will be experiencing over the course of the short time. The AIG holdings and the issues surrounding that, that’s a separate issue all together, not that one doesn’t affect the other to some degree. But I’m not going to get into specifics on AIG Inc. but I do want to make sure that folks understand that there is a distinction. There is capital that is actually dedicated to an operating company, in this case Lexington, American International Specialty, among others. That capital is intended to be available to pay policyholder claims.
So the point is, the question is how are they utilizing that capital. As Tony pointed out and E.G. pointed out maybe there is a little bit of aggressiveness because of the flight to quality issues and the fact that they are losing some of that. They may be losing some of those big accounts and the bundling of accounts as Chris pointed out earlier. But that’s something we monitor very regularly with the AIG companies and we’re very mindful of it.

MARKEL: I would say, Lee, that I agree. I’m glad Dan brought it up. I think our view of AIG has to be cautioned by his comments concerning the capital that’s in the insurance company subsidiaries and the distinction between the holding company. Clearly that’s a proper cautionary remark.

LASSITER: That’s also why I said I believe it’s going to be midyear before it plays out. Who is going to own it? Is it going to remain intact or is it going to be owned by others and broken up? All of that leads to different scenarios in terms of what they might be and how they might underwrite going forward. We don’t have a crystal ball for that frankly.