Archive for June, 2012

The world’s financial markets seem to be in a continual state of uncertainty and flux thanks largely to the economic crisis in the Eurozone led by fears about Greece, Spain and Italy, concerns about debt in the U.S., a possible slowing economy in China, the spectre of a slowing Japanese economy and the threat of […]

U.S. specialty insurance company Assurant Inc. has published details of the completion of their property catastrophe reinsurance program for the 2012 renewal year. Assurant placed its traditional catastrophe reinsurance program in two phases, at the January and June renewals, with more than 50 reinsurers. Their catastrophe reinsurance program is supplemented with the Ibis Re catastrophe […]

Last Friday we wrote about the pressure that recent inflows of non-traditional capacity from capital market investment sources have placed on the traditional reinsurance market in Bermuda in our coverage of an analyst report on the Bermuda market. Now we’ve noticed that the Royal Gazette have covered similar comments from some of Bermuda’s top re/insurance […]

Another week has passed and as usual on a Monday morning we start the week with an update for you on the most popular stories of the last week. This week it includes life insurance securitization, the size of the catastrophe bond market and news on the impact that capital market capital is having on […]

Every so often on Artemis we write about hail and the sizeable insurance losses severe hailstorms can inflict particularly in the U.S. Another example of this has been highlighted after a day of hail storms in Texas on the 13th June caused severe losses to auto and property lines of business. Hail is an interesting […]

Reinsurance broker Willis Re has published an interesting report looking at the potential impact of the new RMS V11 risk model when used to calculate catastrophe exposures for European windstorm risks including storm surge. It’s interesting to read as most of the focus to date has been on the impact of the new risk model […]

The insured loss estimate for European windstorm Joachim has been reduced again by PERILS AG, the independent Zurich-based company providing industry-wide European catastrophe insurance data and loss indices. European windstorm Joachim impacted Western Europe from 15 – 17 December 2011. In their last update on the storm in March, PERILS pegged the insured loss amount […]

The analyst and research firm Keefe, Bruyette & Woods Inc. have published another of their reports looking at the Bermuda reinsurance market. These regular reports are put together based on the feedback KBW receive while interviewing key players in the Bermuda reinsurance market. They provide an insight into the issues which are troubling reinsurers domiciled […]

The European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA), one of the three supervisory entities in the European System of Financial Supervision and responsible for the insurance, reinsurance and pensions sectors, has published its latest Financial Stability Report for the first half of 2012. The report looks at issues affecting the financial stability of the re/insurance […]

An interesting difference of opinion amongst some of the leading rating agencies has become apparent in their respective press releases regarding Prudential’s recent $26 billion pension risk transfer deal for automaker General Motors. The transaction saw GM offload a huge amount of risk by transferring $26 billion of future pension obligations to Prudential. Not strictly […]