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Product Development Units in banks, insurers, brokerage houses, and other financial intermediaries churn out groundbreaking financial instruments regularly. Governments from the United Kingdom to New Zealand set up "innovation teams or units" to foster innovation and support it. Canada's is more than two decades old.

Last year, we proposed rules to protect every citizen's medical records. This year, we will finalize those rules. We have also taken the first steps to protect the privacy of bank and credit card statements and other financial records. Soon I will send legislation to the Congress to finish that job. We must also act to prevent any genetic discrimination by employers or insurers.

If our insurers are defrauded by foreigners, the nation is then, indeed, more nearly affected, but even in that case, it is to be remembered, that the private interest of the insurers, who must be immediately ruined, is a sufficient security for the publick.

That the insurers were not always free from serious risk is indicated by a New Orleans news item in 1818 relating that two local insurance companies had recently lost more than forty thousand dollars in consequence of the robbery of seventy-two slaves out of a vessel from the Chesapeake by a piratical boat off the Berry Islands.

Should the voyage be safely performed, the profits would be double the original expense. Should the ship be taken or wrecked, the insurers would have bound themselves to make ample, speedy, and certain indemnification. Thetford's brother, a wary and experienced trader, was to be the supercargo. "All my money was laid out upon this scheme.

Oriental rugs and diamonds are conspicuously in evidence. Insurers are paying their losses to some extent, and many people find themselves in possession of more ready money than they ever had before. They are rich, though they may have no house to sleep in.

I happened to be lucky in this first essay; for the borrower, having in six weeks expended the money, made an excursion on the highway, was apprehended, tried, convicted of felony, and cut his own throat, to prevent the shame of a public execution; so that his bond was discharged by the insurers.

And, we may add, over-generous pension plans shift risk from current generations to future ones. Risk transfer is the traditional business of insurers. But governments are in direct competition not only with insurance companies but also with the capital markets. Futures, forwards, and options contracts are, in effect, straightforward insurance policies.

"Then I may look upon my ventur' as worse than nothing?" he said. "The insurers will raise a question about paying for a craft that has been rebuilt in this way, and the Vineyard folks will be sartain to put in a claim of salvage, both on account of two of their hands helping you with the work, and on account of the materials and we with no cargo, as an offset to it all!"

It will not require, sir, an imagination very fertile, or a knowledge very extensive, to supply arguments sufficient to refute the supposed demonstration; in opposition to which it may be urged, that this kind of commerce is of a peculiar nature, that it subsists upon opinion, and is preserved by the reputation of our insurers; a reputation that the insurers of other nations may obtain by the same means, and from whom we shall, therefore, never recover it.