Archive for November, 2009

Agriculture Insurance Company of India is preparing to begin offering weather insurance cover for mangos and apples in selected producing blocks in Himachal, India. This pilot scheme is being run to assess whether the product works for the insured, insurer and government prior to a larger rollout (if successful).

Eurex, the European derivatives exchange, has launched it’s U.S. hurricane futures for 2010. The instruments are now available to trade for the whole of next year for the same three regions as 2009 (U.S. nationwide, Gulf Coast and Florida).  More details are available from Reuters. You can find the hurricane futures on the Eurex website […]

We’ve been big supporters (read our previous coverage here) of the various weather and catastrophe related microinsurance programs being piloted around the world over the last few years. While not perfect, these schemes are helping to get much needed cover to business people in developing countries to help them hedge against the very real weather […]

One of the big things to come out of the recent financial market turmoil is a desire to have better back stops for the banking system and to find a way to prevent the need for breaking up banks that fail. Many ideas have been mooted, including catastrophe bonds (as we’ve written about previously), with […]

Various sources are reporting that Swiss Re is preparing to launch a fourth excess mortality transaction under its Vita series. Vita Capital IV is said to be a $75m mortality bond, it started as $50m but demand has been high and the deal has upsized significantly. It’s assumed that Vita Capital IV will replace a […]

Flagstone Re is readying a catastrophe bond transaction for the market called Montana Re Ltd. We mentioned this deal after writing about its existence the other day, now details are emerging we can bring you up to speed. Montana Re is a Cayman Islands based SPV set up to issue the notes from this $120m […]

AIR Worldwide has taken a look at the top ten U.S. hurricanes and earthquakes in history and worked out how much damage they would cause if they’d occurred today. This serves as a potent reminder to the reinsurance and risk financing communities of the power of natural catastrophes and the need to be prepared with […]

It’s time for our monthly look at how the Swiss Re published catastrophe bond price and total return indices are fairing. You can find our commentary from last month here for comparison.

Munich Re have published a new article on their website saluting the new found health of the insurance-linked security and catastrophe bond market. The article ‘Insurance-linked securities – the market celebrates its comeback‘ discusses the problems the market faced in 2008, the comeback of the market, the reasons ILS are here to stay and why […]

The weather derivatives market is particularly quiet these days, not just because everyone is in Paris at the WRMA European event, but rather because the bulk of the market seems to be quietly transacted without any need for fanfare or announcement. The market is doing quite nicely on exchanges like the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME). […]