A senior Marsh executive has rebuffed talk that the insurance market is beginning to soften.

President and chief executive of Marsh Europe and the Middle East, William Malloy described the current insurance market as "a seller's market, in most cases".

Speaking at a roundtable on risk management, Malloy said that due to the combination of lower investment returns and higher losses, the current market cycle was unlike any for the past 40 years.

But Malloy said that while many companies had been hit hard by the sudden rise in insurance rates, brokers were not to blame.

"I don't think any broker could have seen that coming, to know what effect it would have on the marketplace," Malloy said. "I would like to think that we weren`t tarnished."

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