Archive for July, 2008

Another tropical storm has formed today, this time over the western Caribbean sea. Dolly, the fourth named storm of the Atlantic tropical storm season, formed out of an area of thunderstorms and low pressure which had been crossing the Caribbean. Currently packing 45mph winds, Dolly is headed straight for the Yucatan peninsula and is expected […]

An area of low pressure off the coast of South Carolina has now strengthened into the third tropical storm of the season. Tropical storm Cristobal is hugging the coast of the Carolinas and is expected to move along the coast over the next few days bringing rainfall amounts of 3 to 5 inches. Some further […]

itravel2000, the Canadian online travel agent, has been running a promotion since June called Let It Snow. The promotion promises to give customers their qualifying holidays for free if it snows 5 inches or more at Calgary, Halifax, Montreal or Toronto airports on New Years Day, January 1, 2009. It’s been so successful for them […]

There’s been a lot of news about State Farms proposed 47% increase in Florida rates over the last few days. State Farm say that they need this increase to “stabilize State Farm Florida’s financial condition in order to be able to pay our customers’ claims, including those due to catastrophic events such as hurricanes.” Now […]

Here’s some more information on the ‘coastal hurricane zone’ plan. This could get interesting as the plan is to create a market based on these zones which will allow private insurers to be involved with the government providing the last resort backstop.

Travelers have a plan to help solve coastal homeowners insurance problems by ‘coastal hurricane zones’ regulated by the federal government. Great idea (read the story for the full plan), and it would seem to me that if regulated these should become the zones that hurricane derivatives and catastrophe bonds are based on in the future.

It’s interesting to read discussions about catastrophe bond type structures and their possible application to classes of risks other than natural perils. It regularly crops up in articles about financial risks with academics discussing the possibility of using a cat bond structure. I found this blog post by Jim Peterson, a U.S. based lawyer, which […]

The Weather Risk Management Association has made the presentations from it’s recent annual meeting available on it’s website. For those who couldn’t make the meeting here are links directly to the presentations (in MS Powerpoint). Long Term Management of Weather and Other Risks Robert Shiller, Chief Economist, MacroMarkets LLC Parametric Extreme Events Warren Isom, Executive […]

Reinsurance Magazine is reporting that Carvill have announced that it’s Carvill Hurricane Index contracts are selling extremely well on the CME. They say that the total traded in value is now fast approaching $60m. Considering these contracts only launched just over a year ago this is a great endorsement of exchange trading catastrophe risks. It […]

We’ve just added to the website full details on the impending $120m catastrophe securitization deal between Allianz Risk Transfer (Bermuda) Ltd. and their Cayman Islands based SPV Blue Coast Ltd. The deal provides protection from U.S. hurricanes to Allianz ART over the next few years and features an innovative trigger mechanism which removes a great […]