QuestionerI have been noticing that there have been a tremendous amount of new capital going into reinsurance carriers. And I was wondering if you could make a few comments about that. If you think that will affect the reinsurance business.
Ajit JainBut there's been capital come in. And that is negative for our business. I mean, because any capital that's brought in basically will get employed. We are willing at Berkshire, and we do it. We are willing to sit on the sidelines in... in the reinsurance business. We'll offer quotes, but somebody that will cut those prices substantially if they've got a lot of capital and want to keep busy. And if you've got a lot of capital in this business or if you've attracted a lot of capital, you will do something. You might like to do something smart, but if need be, you'll do something dumb. You'll rationalize it so you think it's smart. But you will do it. You won't just sit there and write the shareholders at the end of the year and said, you know, we asked you for $300 million last year, and we'd like to report that it's all so. safely in a bank account at Citigorp. It just doesn't work that way. So they will go out and do something. People don't like to sit around all day and do nothing. And that means that prices will get cut under certain circumstances and that's happening now. We will, at Berkshire, we do have a rule about downsizing on that. And we have promised people at all of our insurance operations that we will never have layoffs because of a because of a drop in volume. We do not want the people who run our insurance business to feel they have to write X dollars in order to keep everybody there. We can afford some overhead around that's costing us a little money for lack of using it at full capacity, because it isn't that much relative to the size of our insurance operation. What we can't afford are people feeling some internal compulsory to keep writing business in order to keep their jobs. So we have a strong policy on that. And if the business falls away in terms of price, we won't be doing business, but we will be around to do business in a big way when the circumstance is reversed.