Risk, Re-/Insurance and Future Thinking
From the category archives:
Citi analyst Joshua Shanker said reinsurers might get rate increases of as much as 10 percent for 1/1 renewals. Shankar cited the following factors: investment losses, large storms, accumulated casualty loss trends and financial difficulties faced by several of the industry’s largest commercial insurers and reinsurers as explaining the position, to which I would also add the [...]
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As from 1/1 Amlin will be out of the credit insurance market (Source: FT). While they only have less than 5% market share, it’s a further indication of difficulties in the sector, and perceived difficult times ahead for the wider economy. CEO, Charles Phillips, said that while getting reinsurance for credit insurance was becoming more [...]
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CEO Jacques Aigrain told Swiss daily NZZ that rates in the reinsurance market are picking up again — “We are seeing that the conditions and margins in the actual reinsurance business are improving.” However, “lower returns on investment should be expected” he went on to say, though perhaps that didn’t really need spelling out. Swiss Re [...]
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In the recent (24.10.08) case of Markel –v- Gothaer Allgemeine & Kontinentale the Commercial Court considered the nature and role of an agent in a dispute over a Claims Co-operation Clause. It’s an oddly fact-specific case, but there are some wider issues in play. This was a summary judgment application by reinsurers (Markel) to dismiss [...]
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In a rather vulgarly titled (”Obama presidency is good new for the legal profession“) article, law marketeer Larry Bodine points to some areas that might cause renewed legal problems in the States under the new regime. In particular: Tort reform has been so effective that there are hardly any trials any more. The National Center for [...]
The new administration, struggling to deal with the largest deficit in over 50 years, will have to look into all sorts of ways to raise revenue and plug perceived holes. One of those is to tax those evil offshore reinsurers who write US business but then, oh horror, reinsure it in Bermuda, one effect of which [...]
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There’s a wryly amusing article from Garry Booth over at the Lloyd’s Risk blog on the difficulties facing the market as seen from Baden-Baden. The three elephants in the room to which he refers are: capital market meltdown, falling share prices, and global economic recession. Primary insurers who want to maintain their current business model (ie stay [...]
Looking down from my hotel on the rooftops of Houston, I can still make out the debris that must have been left behind by Ike. It reminds me of the time that I was in New York about 7-8 weeks after 9/11. We were staying in the Waldorf-Astoria and when I crawled under the table [...]
Willis boss Joe Plumeri tells the FT that without serious (think $50bn-$100bn) catastrophe losses, it could be the end of 2009 or into 2010 before rates recover. “All the signs are that I don’t think the soft market is going to last a long long time . . . but it does not seem [...]
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Reinsurance assets will more easily be accessible to foreign liquidators in multinational insolvency proceedings following the House of Lords’ decision last week in the long-running HIH saga. Their Lordships found that English courts should co-operate “as much as possible” to ensure that the assets of bankrupt companies based abroad are distributed among creditors under a single [...]
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