2011

2011 saw the highest economic losses from natural catastrophes and man-made disasters on record and the second highest insured losses ever, according to the latest sigma report from reinsurer Swiss Re. Total economic losses leaped from the $226 billion experienced in 2010 to a massive $370 billion in 2011, while insured losses came in at […]

Diversity and the hunt for diversification are key topics which regularly come up in our articles, our discussions with participants in the market and our coverage of deals and transactions in the catastrophe bond and insurance-linked securities spaces. Diversity is a factor which enables the market to grow, encourages investors to enter the market, makes […]

Catastrophe bond and insurance-linked security issuance patterns went out the window last year as the issues the market faced impacted primary market deal flow and resulted in some months drastically underperforming while others significantly outperformed in terms of new cat bonds or ILS issued. Reinsurer Swiss Re published a graph in their recent ILS market update, […]

Aon Benfield Securities have published a report on the insurance-linked securities and catastrophe bond market during the fourth quarter of 2011. Similar to 2009 and 2010 the fourth quarter of 2011 was the most active quarter of the year for cat bond and ILS issuance with $1.99 billion (according to Aon Benfield’s numbers) issued in […]

Here’s an interesting chart from Aon Benfield’s recent Reinsurance Market Outlook report. The chart shows the volume of catastrophe bonds issued by quarter since 2008. The first thing that jumps out is that despite the difficulties and issues which affected cat bond issuance during 2011, it was actually the most balanced year of issuance in […]

Reinsurer Munich Re has published a review of the natural catastrophe loss event which impacted around the globe during 2011. According to their data, 2011 insured catastrophe losses reached $105 billion, beating the previous record losses of 2005 which Munich Re recorded as $101 billion.

2011 has been a very interesting year for the catastrophe bond and insurance-linked securities market. We’ve seen cat bond defaults as a number of deals became a total loss, uncertainty as issuance stalled after the new RMS risk model was released, continuing financial market turbulence and other disasters which threatened exposed cat bonds. Despite all […]

Of the approximately $108 billion of natural and man-made catastrophe insured losses experienced during 2011 the Asia-Pacific region accounted for over two-thirds of them, according to data published by Guy Carpenter today. This broke a historical trend of U.S. based events dictating the movement of property catastrophe reinsurance pricing, something borne out by the large […]

For catastrophe bond issuance to reach $4.5 billion by the end of 2011 is “quite exceptional”, says Swiss private banking firm and ILS fund manager Clariden Leu in their most recent managers report. Given the low volume of issuance through the first half of the year, despite a good start in Q1, the fact that […]

Swiss Re have released their preliminary estimate of insured losses resulting from natural catastrophes and man-made disasters occurring during 2011. Swiss Re’s sigma team estimate the total insured loss at $108 billion with natural catastrophes contributing $103 billion of that, well up on the $43 billion experienced during 2010.