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October 19, 2012 at 09:35 AM
The Hartford (NYSE:HIG) recently announced that it will continue to sponsor the U.S. Paralympics through 2016.
Hartford has been backing U.S. Paralympic athletes since 1994 and became a founding partner of the U.S. Paralympics program in 2003.
Mike Concannon, the executive vice president for group benefits at Hartford, said the company is proud to continue to support individuals break through physical limitations to achieve greatness.
As a digital content churner outer, occupying a momentarily stable niche in the space-time-information continuum between being a straight reporter and a wild and woolly columnist, I was happy to see a company beset by the forces of change continuing to support something nice.
Hartford, of course, has been making a point of disposing of individual life, retirement plan and broker-dealer businesses that had seemed so core to operations before 2008 and so extraneous after the Great Recession swooped in.
The company has said that it will be keeping the group benefits business.
In these sad, divestment-oriented times, it’s hard to know whether, “We’re keeping Unit X” means that a company really likes Unit X, or whether, when a company says something nice about any unit that does anything riskier than getting free money from the Fed and lending it to the U.S. Treasury for 1 percent interest per year, the company simply hasn’t found a buyer for Unit X.
The Fed’s “zero interest rate policy,” the election wrangling, and the turmoil in Congress seem to make this a poor environment for planning seriously for any event that is expected to occur more than a few days in the future.
