Car insurance companies' losses have nothing to do with the banks or financial markets. It's a business run on statistics and logic - until they all got carried away with trying to outbid each other on price through those comparison websites. They lost a lot of money, and now we are being asked to pay that back.
One interesting thing - people I know who insure through Direct Line, including me, have had a lower percentage increase in their premiums than most others who are on those sites. It's purely subjective I know, but it does make me wonder...
Lastly, and by no means least, companies in all parts of our lives have discovered that when they put prices up, nothing happens. We don't protest, we don't organise ourselves to make their business hurt, we don't change our habits. We carry on driving just as we did before, we carry on running and insuring our cars, we carry on buying our petrol not in low-cost supermarkets, and we carry on going to Sainsbury and Waitrose as opposed to switching to Lidl and Asda.
Just imagine is we all worked together, and put ourselves out so that we all bought petrol from only (say) Shell, and boycotted all other stations? If (say) Esso reduced prices, we all switched to them. But, if someone tried to organise this, the apathetic British wouldn't do anything to put themselves out for the greater good. Frankly, people, we only have ourselves to blame here!
£1.39 at last nights diesel fill-up, but only 20% increase in my premium - some days you just get lucky!!
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