Archive for July, 2011

Overall the global insurance market continues to be well capitalised and generally competitive despite the major catastrophe losses experienced this year says insurance broker Marsh in their Second Quarter 2011 Insurance Market Update which was published yesterday.

Standard & Poor’s (S&P) has begun to resolve the issues surrounding ratings of 16 catastrophe bond tranches which use the Risk Management Solutions (RMS) U.S. hurricane model. RMS released a new risk model earlier this year which S&P felt had sufficiently changed the risk profile of the transactions to warrant placing them on CreditWatch negative […]

The Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF), a non-profit multi country risk pool who provide parametric hurricane and earthquake cover to Caribbean countries, has now entered into its fifth policy year after all 16 member countries renewed in June.

We know that having easy access to information and updates pertaining to recent natural catastrophes around the globe is important to readers of Artemis. So to help our readers access timely information and updates we’ve partnered with catastrophe risk modelling firm EQECAT to give you easy access to their CatWatch™ catastrophe reports.

With the world experiencing turbulent times economically this year including the concerns over European sovereign debt and the spectre of the U.S. government debt ceiling being breached effectively putting the U.S. into a default position, we felt it was time to ask one of the rating agencies whether they felt there was likely to be […]

Aon Benfield have published their Monthly Cat Recap Report for June which is put together by their Impact Forecasting catastrophe modelling and analysis arm. The monthly updates provide a useful review of the events around the globe which will create losses for re/insurers.

Once again the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association (TWIA) hits the headlines for all the wrong reasons. The Texas state hurricane insurer of last resort has now exhausted its ability to pay claims resulting from hurricane Ike which struck the Texas coast in September 2008.

The California Earthquake Authority (CEA), the publicly managed organisation that provides residential earthquake insurance to Californian residents, held its latest governing board meeting on the 30th June. At the meeting, one of the agenda items was to continue discussions and seek approval to move forwards with plans to transfer a portion of their risks to […]

Contingent capital, which provides a source of capital under certain circumstances and triggers, is becoming a more popular way to provide a predictable source of financing at exactly the times that a company requires it. The other day we wrote about French reinsurer SCOR’s contingent capital facility being triggered due to their increasing Q1 natural […]

An open letter from the American Securitization Forum (ASF) to the U.S. government agencies concerned with the regulation of financial markets and the creation of the Dodd-Frank reforms requests that any new credit risk retention regulations should take into account the needs of niche securitization sectors. One of those niche securitization sectors mentioned in the […]