Endgame

GO, A classic Japanese board-game, is not for the impatient. Only after several hundred moves does a player's strategy become clear. Similarly, the alliances and mergers among Japanese banks, brokers and insurers in the past couple of years have been bewildering in their complexity. Like the placement of stones on a go board, they have seemed to belie the guiding intelligence behind them. Some have even entertained the novel idea that market forces have been shaping events. Thankfully, however, evidence of the wise, steadying hand of government is at last re-emerging, this time in one of the financial world's more thrilling corners: the non-life insurance industry.