The hardening property/casualty mar...

The hardening property/casualty market continues to drive more business onto the parts of excess and surplus insurers. As standard carriers shed noncore or under-performing lines, these risks are increasingly surfacing in the surplus-lines market, which underwrites them at higher rates and below more restrictive terms.

Managing general agents say that in this regard, the surplus-lines, or nonadmitted market, functions as a safety valve, providing policies to customers with manifold high hazard and unusual risks otherwise declineed by the standard market.

"A convenient deal of business that heretofore had been in the standard-type markets apparently is flowing