Lloyd's of London profit halves on record claims

The Lloyd's of London insurance market revealed that record claims from disasters including the Chilean earthquake and U.S. oil spill halved its profits, and said it saw no respite from a steady decline in prices. Lloyd's, which traces its origins back 322 years to a London coffee house where wealthy merchants insured ships, on Tuesday posted a pretax profit of 628 million pounds ($994 million) for the first half of 2010, down from 1.32 billion a year earlier.