Archive for May, 2011

The market for pension scheme hedging, de-risking and pension risk transfer has taken another step forward as Prudential announced the completion of the first pension buy-in transaction in the United States. To date the pension risk transfer market has been more prevalent in Europe.

Top Layer Re, the joint venture sidecar which was set up by Rennaissance Re and State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company in 1999 to provide a vehicle to take only the very high layers of worldwide catastrophe reinsurance and retro programs, has had its ratings affirmed by A.M. Best. This despite the sidecar vehicle taking […]

The Bermuda Stock Exchange (BSX) has approved the secondary listing of both ordinary and Class C shares of the CATCo Reinsurance Opportunities Fund Ltd., operated by CATCo Investment Management Ltd. Effective on the 20th May, the BSX listing committee approved listing of 87,642,000 ordinary shares and 124,446,737 Class C shares. The primary listing sits on […]

Standard & Poor’s has announced that it has reconsidered the preliminary rating that it assigned to the Class 5 tranche of catastrophe bond Residential Reinsurance 2011 Ltd. when it was first marketed earlier this month (previous article here). Originally S&P had assigned the Class 5 notes a rating of ‘B’ but today they have raised […]

Here’s a piece of news that you may not be expecting which has just broken and could hint at how the much discussed RMS risk model change may be reacted to by the ratings agencies. One tranche of USAA’s 2009 Residential Reinsurance 2009 Ltd. catastrophe bond has been downgraded due to an updated risk model, […]

Risk modeller EQECAT are the first to announce an estimated insured loss figure for the tornado which struck the city of Joplin, Missouri yesterday. As we wrote yesterday, we suspected that the storm was going to contribute a sizeable loss to the aggregate losses which have been mounting in this record U.S. tornado season, and […]

Tropical Storm Risk, a research group backed by Aon Benfield, RSA and Crawford & Company, have stuck with their prediction for an above normal activity Atlantic hurricane season in 2011 and have slightly increased their prediction for the number of storms expected to form. Their last prediction (from April) can be found here, and our […]

The volume of deals completed to de-risk pension schemes of their longevity and other risks looks set to grow according to a report from Hymans Robertson. Their Managing Pension Scheme Risk Report for Q1 2011 looks back at the deals done in the past quarter and ahead to the prospects for Q2 and beyond.

For the first time since the Japanese earthquake on the 11th March, which sent the Swiss Re Cat Bond Performance Indices into a dive, both indices have gained at the latest close on Friday. It’s two week since we last reported on the state of the Swiss Re cat bond indices and it’s beginning to […]

The U.S. continues to be affected by severe thunderstorms and devastating tornadoes, the latest of which impacted the city of Joplin, Missouri yesterday. The BBC report that the city suffered a direct hit from a tornado leaving a trail of destruction and 30 people dead (Update: CNN now report at least 89 dead). CNN eye-witness […]