“It was basically a form of gambling, and it went something like this. “The Fuggers would think of something… — Tom Holt

“It was basically a form of gambling, and it went something like this.

“The Fuggers would think of something that was extremely unlikely to happen, and then they would persuade someone to wager them money that it would. Now the proper term for this arrangement is a sucker bet, but the Fuggers wanted to find a respectable name for it, so they called it Insurance. It caught on, just as they knew it would, and soon it became so respectable that they were able to get people to make a new bet every year, and they called this sort of bet a premium.”

p. 71Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0