INSURANCE: Giant’s Progress

One out of every five persons in the U.S. and Canada is a Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. policyholder. Last week, in its 1955 annual report, the world’s No. 1 insurance company told its 38.3 million policyholders how it and they are doing. They are doing fine. Last year the company wrote $6.5 billion in new policies, 33% more than ever before, and paid out a peak $1.2 billion in benefits. Policies in force reached a staggering $66.1 billion, 17.7% of all life insurance written in the U.S.

Writing policies is only part of its job. The other is investing its $13.9 billion in assets, the largest accumulation of private capital ever assembled by any financial institution anywhere. Metropolitan has been making great changes in where and how it invests its money. Its portfolio now contains 34% in industrial investments v. only 3.1% in 1929; it now has only 5% in railroad bonds v. 21% in 1929. To a great extent it has become a major source of risk capital for U.S. and Canadian industry. In 1955 Metropolitan supplied $48.4 million of the $145 million for Hollinger-Hanna’s huge Labrador-Quebec ore project and financed some of Stavros Niarchos’ giant oil tankers (TIME, Feb. 13). It also put up 50% of the capital for the 36-in. Texas-to-New York pipeline of the Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line Corp., and helped Republic Steel and Armco finance the Reserve Mining Co. to develop Minnesota taconite. Metropolitan plans no further expansion in housing. In the last 35 years, it put $350 million into eight huge housing projects in four cities, but it now complains that with rent ceilings and rising maintenance it can do better elsewhere with its money. Metropolitan’s industrial and housing ventures, plus other investments mainly in city real estate, netted the giant company a comfortable 3.2% after taxes in 1955.