With the bad name that risk-taking of all sorts is being strapped with these days, corporations have pulled back on activities that contain the slightest amounts of peril. Following the law of supply and demand, the cost of limiting those risks has plummeted. Thus, even as financial markets churned, and the annual tally of natural disasters reached the second-highest level on record, the total cost of risk fell by nearly 10 percent last year, according to the latest Benchmark Survey released by the Risk and Insurance Management Society.
