Legal News

Eric Dinallo, the Stock Market?s Unlikely Savior

By Peter Lattman

If you had to credit just one man for yesterday’s 600-point stock-market turnabout, you might tip your hat to Eric Dinallo, the New York State Insurance Superintendent. When news broke yesterday that Dinallo was in “very preliminary” talks to spur a Wall Street bailout of bond insurers Ambac and MBIA, those stocks, and the market at large, soared.

Huh? An state insurance superintendent has saved the stock market? The Law Blog is hardly surprised. Dinallo is a lawyer, and an accomplished one at that. Once Eliot Spitzer’s right-hand man in the attorney general’s office, Dinallo joined the now-governor in Albany a year ago.

If “State Insurance Superintendent” sounds like a lame post to you, it’s not. “He’s probably the most important insurance regulator in the United States,” said an insurance bigwig to the FT in a Dinallo profile last year. Unlike the securities industry, insurance is regulated by the states and New York’s department is among the biggest.

Dinallo, who as a deputy in the attorney general’s office earned his stripes uncovering those damning Merrill Lynch emails that broke open the Wall Street research scandal, has spent the last four years in the private sector. First he worked in the general counsel’s office at Morgan Stanley and, for the past year, he’s been general counsel of insurance broker Willis Group.

Not only is Dinallo (Vassar, NYU Law) a lawyer, his wife’s one too. Priscilla Almodovar, formerly of White & Case, heads New York’s Housing Finance Agency. Here’s their 1995 New York Times wedding announcement.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 24, 2008 (boomark / email).