Archive for March, 2011

Standard & Poor’s, the rating agency, have issued a briefing regarding the ratings of six of the catastrophe bonds exposed to todays Japanese earthquake. The ratings on the six cat bonds which S&P had assessed will remain unchanged for the time being.

Update: Further information on these cat bond transactions can be found here. There are a number of outstanding catastrophe bond transactions (totalling around $1.5 billion) which look like they are exposed to Friday’s earthquake in Japan as far as we can tell from our Deal Directory information. Whether any of these will be triggered is […]

Kane, a provider of risk and insurance management services, has announced in a press release that they are buying HSBC Insurance Management, the worlds fourth largest insurance manager and a leader in the field of insurance-linked securities. The acquisition will create the world’s largest insurance manager with a sizeable interest in the arrangement of catastrophe […]

Update: Our list of the cat bonds exposed to Japan quake can be found here. We’re hearing reports from around the world that reinsurer stock prices have dropped as exchanges opened this morning as traders get to grips with the prospects of a major insured loss event from the earthquake that struck Japan this morning.

A major earthquake, initially measured at 7.9 but now upgraded to a magnitude of 8.9 has struck off the northeast coast of Honshu island Japan. The epicentre was approximately 250 miles from Tokyo and at a depth of 20 miles. Severe shaking has been experienced in Tokyo and along the east coast and a tsunami […]

The Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF) have announced a change of their placing reinsurance broker for this year. Guy Carpenter will be taking over as the new reinsurance broker for the facility and replaces Aon Benfield who provided the service to the facility last year.

Solvency II is one of the hottest topics in the reinsurance and risk transfer markets at the moment. The impending changes to the regulatory environment could lead to increasingly strenuous capital requirements for re/insurers and a change in the way companies look at risk transfer.

Reinsurer Munich Re has announced that the catastrophe events in Australia and New Zealand which occurred in the first two months of 2011 have already caused a claims burden of around $1.5 billion. The New Zealand earthquake is estimated to have cost them around $1 billion and the flooding in Australia and Cyclone Yassi approximately […]

U.S. national think tank The Heartland Institute has published a report outlining the problems and potential solutions with the insurance environment in Texas. The Texas Windstorm Insurance Association (TWIA) has been under increasing pressure to reform lately. In 2010 it was found that the association could not cover the costs of a major hurricane and […]

Just the other day we wrote about the news that the longevity risk transfer market was showing a growing interest in the Netherlands as the next likely market to see a longevity swap completed. To date only the UK has seen a deal where a reinsurer (or other counterparty) takes on the risk of longevity […]