Surety Rate-Making

Although corporate suretyship has existed in the United States for sixty years as respects fidelity lines (indemnification for losses due to employees' dishonesty) and for forty-odd years as respects most of the other important branches of the business, very little printed material is available to anybody minded to make a study of surety rates. Mr. R. H. Towner, who founded the Towner Rating Bureau in 1909, and conducted it with brilliant success for twenty-eight years thereafter, is the outstanding authority on surety rates; and any bibliography on rate-making would consist of little more than citations to addresses of his, devoted primarily to broader aspects of suretyship but containing incidentally references to rates. In addition, state insurance departments have sometimes compiled tables of statistics showing premiums written and losses paid in various branches of suretyship.