A market in flux: insurers discuss an uncertain world.

Insurance companies are finding their sea legs in a different kind of market, the likes of which they've never seen before.

In spite of heavy catastrophe claims from 2008 and the worst financial results in years, insurers are not seeing the market take its usual dramatic hard turn, according to industry executives.

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"It's the first time the industry has had issues with results combined with a financial crisis," said Thomas A. Lawson, executive vice president of FM Global.

The market is trying to harden, but there are not clear indications across a range of products that it is occurring, said Dave Duclos, executive vice president and chief executive of XL Insurance, a unit of XL Capital.

The state of the market and the global economic downturn were hot topics at RIMS this year. Most seemed to agree on why the market was different, but few crystal balls showed when or if the market would take a hard turn.

Mike Foley, chief executive officer of Zurich North America Commercial, said the market is at a point of uncertainty and transition. "It's a time where basically the market has a decision. In historical hard markets, we've gone one to two years further, and at that point, we have to take sharp price increases to make up for the lagging economics that hit us. If we actually proactively address it ... we can describe to clients that ... we need to get higher returns on our underwriting results and really go back to fundamentals and making sum that we are earning underwriting profits on the risks that we take on our balance sheets."