Archive for November, 2012

Montpelier Re’s planned reinsurance and retrocessional linked investment fund, Blue Capital Global Reinsurance Fund Limited, is getting closer to launch with the publication today of a listing announcement and prospectus for its first public share offering. As we wrote three weeks ago, the Bermudian reinsurer has been planning to launch a fund based collateralized reinsurance […]

Interesting news today as Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. entered into a reinsurance agreement with Spanish insurance company VidaCaixa, Sociedad Anónima de Seguros y Reaseguros, a wholly owned subsidiary of Spain’s CaixaBank S.A. We don’t always cover straight reinsurance transactions but in this case it is interesting as this reinsurance agreement see’s Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway […]

The 2012 Atlantic tropical storm and hurricane season looked like it was going to be relatively benign as far as the insurance, reinsurance and catastrophe bond sectors were concerned until Sandy came along and turned the season on its head. Up until that point at the end of October it was easy to think that […]

In a report sent to investors in its CS IRIS Low Volatility Plus Fund, investment manager Credit Suisse has announced that they intend to implement side-pockets for any investments potentially exposed to losses from hurricane Sandy. A side-pocket will allow Credit Suisse to effectively segregate the investments that are at risk from the rest of […]

Back in October we wrote that two life insurance-linked securitization transactions sponsored by Unum Group had been favourably reviewed by Moody’s and their ratings affirmed based on the both deals performance and the quality of the underlying assets. Now another rating agency, A.M. Best, has similarly affirmed both sets of securitized life insurance linked notes […]

2012 has been a good year for the catastrophe bond and insurance-linked securities market so far. We’ve seen issuance this year hit the second highest level on record, we currently have just over $5.6 billion worth of 2012 transactions listed in our Deal Directory which is second only to 2007. The market has also reached […]

The estimates of economic losses from hurricane and super-storm Sandy keep rising northwards and are now fast approaching the $70 billion mark. The estimates given for New York and New Jersey states alone are almost there, with the estimate for New York still at $33 billion of economic losses and the estimate for New Jersey […]

U.S. insurer Allstate, who have one of the largest market shares across the northeast and mid-Atlantic states which were impacted by super-storm Sandy, has published an estimate for losses suffered by the Allstate group from the hurricane today. Allstate have estimated that Sandy has caused them a gross loss of $1.275 billion, with 66% in […]

The latest catastrophe bond to come to market has now priced and is expected to formally close by the end of this week, according to our sources. Residential Reinsurance 2012 Ltd. (Series 2012-2) is the 19th transaction from regular cat bond sponsor USAA and the first to come to market containing U.S. hurricane risk since […]

After a catastrophe event with the scale, impact and uncertainty of super-storm and hurricane Sandy you might expect that the insurance-linked securities and catastrophe bond investment universe would have seen a large decline in returns during October. In fact, the average return made by insurance-linked securities (ILS) funds, as measured by the Eurekahedge ILS Advisers […]