I was hanging out at my friends office and he showed me a trading terminal (it looks like a regular computer) and we got to talking about finance. Its above my head but my friend has a degree in accounting. He showed me something funny.
Lloyds of London, which is actually in 'The City of London' is technically insolvent. Its impossible for them to make any substantial payouts in case of an accident. Now that didn't sound right, but my friend had bought a report on them from PWC. and compared them to Geiko. They have money and assets and they're publicly traded. But their accounting is 'irregular'. This is all btw publicly available information its not insider info Im telling you. You can look them up yourself.
But its more byzantine than you would expect. I started looking up what their assets are. You would expect passenger jets, or cargo ships. Things with known values. But its not like that. They have bonds from the Crimean War, and UK war ships, and stadiums in the US. Cargo ships are insured by the Norwegians and we know they have a trillian in their soverign wealth fund.
They seem to have a corner on institutional investors who want arbitrary valued assets.
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Talc ago
I read something after the 1996 Docklands bombings which said it would take Lloyds 80-100 years to recover, and a second similar event before that would cause them to cease to exist.