Insurance Monopolies, a variety of specialised finance companies effecting monopoly concentration and control in the insurance field under imperialism. Their function is accumulating uninvested capital (in currency) and savings through insurance channels and utilising these insurance funds to finance monopoly corporations and the capitalist state. The origin and expansion of insurance monopolies is linked to the deteriorating economic situation of the working people who, faced with the obsolescence and inefficiency of the state social security and insurance system, have to turn part of the necessary product into payments to insurance companies for insurance in old age, in anticipation of the possibility of losing their jobs or being incapacitated. Heightened contradictions in the process of capitalist reproduction stimulate the expansion of operations for insuring company property. The money returns in the form of insurance premiums and incomes from active operations are annually far in excess of payments to insurance policy holders. As a result, insurance monopolies can raise enormous amounts of currency that can be used to credit investing capitalists, or purchase bonds, shares and other security issues of commercial, industrial, transport and other corporations. In many countries, insurance monopolies are major holders of corporate securities and occupy leading positions in the long-term financing of the economy. At the same time, the insurance monopolies actively participate in 167 crediting the state, and are representative purchasers of state bonds. The insurance business is a highly monopolised branch of the modern capitalist economy. Most insurance funds are concentrated in the hands of a few large monopolies, which excercise growing pressure in the loan capital market. There is a sharp struggle between competing insurance monopolies for domination of the insurance market, and a great number of mergers and absorptions are occurring. Concurrently, competition with other credit and finance institutions—banks, retirement funds, investment companies, etc.—for investment markets and customers is being intensified. In the course of this struggle there is a concentration of capital and operational diversification among the major insurance monopolies. Reacting to the process of the internationalisation of economic affairs, the big insurance monopolies in capitalist countries are expanding into the world market, penetrating the economy and insurance business of other countries. On the one hand, this development results in the establishment of a network of foreign divisions and subsidiary companies for looking after insurance operations; on the other, credit and investment expansion is carried into other economic fields abroad. Competiton between the national insurance monopolies in the leading capitalist countries is becoming more acute. By accumulating colossal stocks of capital in their own countries and abroad, the insurance monopolies help concentrate wealth on the one pole and poverty on the other, and serve to expand and increase the economic domination of finance capital as a whole.