Archive for July, 2010

Verisk Analytics is the parent company of AIR Worldwide and the Property Claims Services (PCS) brands and as such is well known in risk management and risk transfer markets. Today they’ve announced the launch of a new, high resolution catastrophe loss index which will be known as the Verisk Catastrophe Index.

The second quarter of 2010 has seen some severe weather in the U.S. midwest, one of the worst events being a hailstorm which also saw tornadoes in Oklahoma. That event alone caused losses of around $1B (coverage here). How will that affect large multi-national insurance companies? You’d expect them to have good hedging and risk […]

Yesterday the Committee of European Banking Supervisors announced the results of a month long stress test of 91 European banking institutions. The banks have been subjected to this examination to test whether they would be able to survive a second recession or other financial market shocks.

The winners of the annual Environmental Finance Awards 2010 have been announced. The awards, from the long running monthly magazine which covers areas of finance and risk which touch on the environment, recognise excellence in the application of financial markets knowledge to the worlds pressing environmental issues. Each year they hand out awards for the […]

Two new high profile members have signed up to the Life & Longevity Markets Association. Morgan Stanley and UBS have both joined as full members of the LLMA bringing their membership up to ten high profile financial organisations (AXA, Deutsche Bank, J.P. Morgan, Legal & General, Pension Corporation, Prudential PLC, RBS, Swiss Re, Morgan Stanley […]

Having written in the last week about the volume of catastrophe bonds which are listed on the stock exchanges  in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands I thought it would be a good idea to list them out by domicile for your information. We are going to include this information into a new catastrophe bond Deal […]

The Cayman Islands Stock Exchange really is the dominant domicile of choice for catastrophe bond listings at the moment. Bermuda is trying to attract new listings with it’s new regulations which make listing easier than before, but with just over $1B of listed cat bonds (as we wrote about recently)  it has a way to […]

You may be forgiven for thinking that hurricane forecasters were being overzealous with their predictions. The high number of storms predicted seemed almost impossible after the quiet season experienced last year and now, over a month in, the season seems benign so far. WSI Corp have revisited their forecast and adjusted it although not as […]

Swiss Re issued a three year multi-peril catastrophe bond in 2008 called Vega Capital Ltd. (you can read all about Vega Capital in our catastrophe bond Deal Directory). The $150m transaction was designed to provide Swiss Re with cover for U.S. hurricane, California earthquake, European windstorm, Japanese typhoon and Japanese earthquake.

The China Daily newspaper is today reporting that the country may have it’s first weather insurance policies before the end of the year. The policies will be designed to help farmers cope with economic losses and hardship resulting from natural disasters.