Tom Wilson, the chief executive of Allstate Insurance, called for a federal insurance regulator to oversee the regulation of national insurance companies. In an opinion piece, in the New York Times, Wilson owns up to the part that insurance companies have played in the collapse of the financial markets, most prominently AIG.

Insurance companies are not regulated by the federal government, but rather by the states, and in Wilson’s opinion the states do not have the expertise, that a federal regulator would, in recognizing and dealing with possible future risks to the financial markets.

It is most probably reassuring to the American public to have the CEO of one of the county’s major insurance companies providing an insight into a problem that needs fixing, so as to prevent a repeat of mistakes that lead up to our current crisis.

The article was originally published in April and it created plenty of criticism, as one can read in this article in the Chicago Tribune.