Archive for August, 2011

Update: Irene has now reached hurricane strength with 75mph+ sustained winds. The 9th named tropical storm of the 2011 Atlantic hurricane season, Irene, looks like it has the potential to be the most impactful of the season so far. Currently Irene is close to making landfall on Puerto Rico in the Caribbean with maximum sustained […]

As promised on Monday when they suspended its rating, Standard & Poor’s have reinstated the rating on the Queen Street III Capital Ltd. catastrophe bond which provides Munich Re with protection amounting to $150m of their European windstorm risks.

Scottish Re, a Bermuda domiciled life reinsurer currently going through a run-off process, has announced their second quarter 2011 financial results and recorded a loss due to the unwinding of a life insurance securitization transaction. The Orkney 1 life insurance securitization transaction has been unwinding since Scottish Re were placed in run-off and ceased writing […]

U.S. based weather forecaster Accuweather, has published an article suggesting that tropical waves currently in the mid Atlantic could become organised and intensify into a hurricane which may threaten the U.S. coastline later next week. specifically they are referring to area of investigation 97L which you can on the tracking map on our 2011 Atlantic […]

The U.S. NOAA’s National Weather Service has published a report looking at the natural disasters which hit the U.S. so far this year. As our readers will be aware, this year is heading towards records for insured losses from natural disasters around the globe, and the U.S. has been pretty badly hit. The report says […]

Ever since the devastating M9.0 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami which struck northeastern Japan on the 11th March the area off the eastern coast of Honshu island has been plagued with regular and repeated large aftershocks. The latest of those struck in the last hour or so just off the east coast of Miyagi and Fukushima […]

The recently completed Pylon II Capital Ltd. catastrophe bond, which provides electricity and energy firm EDF with reinsurance protection against French windstorms for five years, is one of the more interesting recent deals, particularly due to the involvement of French bank Natixis in many of the roles required to issue a cat bond.

Standard & Poor’s have today, as promised, assigned the official credit ratings to the two tranches of French windstorm catastrophe bond notes issued recently by Pylon II Capital Ltd. The €150m  transaction provides Electricite De France (better known as EDF), a leading energy and electricity generation firm, with five years of reinsurance protection against windstorms […]

CelsiusPro AG, the Swiss-based weather risk management specialist, has teamed up with Aon Benfield Securities to offer weather risk cover to the UK construction industry. CelsiusPro have partnered with the UK’s largest construction trade association, the Federation of Master Builders, giving them access to much of the UK’s construction industry.

As our readers will be aware, we’ve written recently about the potential for the insurance-linked securities and catastrophe bond marketplace to absorb some of the oil industries risks related to large oil spills and the resulting pollution liabilities.