The story
In 1957, the company was founded in Milwaukee by Max H. Karl, a real estate attorney who noticed that his clients were having trouble paying for their new homes. Karl invented modern private mortgage insurance and secured US$250,000 from investors, including friends and business associates, to open MGIC. In 1982, Karl sold the company to Baldwin United for $1.2 billion. In 1983 Baldwin United filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and in 1985 MGIC was liquidated and its assets sold to Northwestern Mutual for $775 million. That same year, Karl and others set up a new company with the same name sometimes called "New MGIC." In 1987, Bill Lacy was appointed chairman and chief executive officer of the company. Karl died in 1995. Lacy died in 2016.
Starting in 2007, the subprime mortgage crisis resulted in record insurance claims for MGIC that threatened its ability to maintain its required regulatory capital. In coordination with the Wisconsin Office of the Commissioner of Insurance and Fannie Mae, MGIC reactivated and recapitalized its original business entity (Old MGIC) for underwriting while it took steps to reduce claim exposure for New MGIC. To increase its capital MGIC conducted several offerings of stock and convertible notes; sold its interest in Sherman Financial Group, a debt collector; and discontinued some practices that it had adopted during the housing bubble such as writing insurance on pools of mortgages. By 2013 MGIC had sufficiently stabilized its capital position to focus again on business growth, and in 2018 New MGIC resumed underwriting.
From Wikipedia’s article on MGIC Investment Corporation, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5