Cat bond news

Record levels of catastrophe bond market issuance in 2025 are reshaping the pricing landscape, AM Best believes, but the rating agency sees no sign of a slow-down ahead, as “all indications point to continued growth.”

Here are the ten most popular news articles, week ending August 24th 2025, covering catastrophe bonds, ILS, reinsurance capital and related risk transfer topics. To ensure you never miss a thing subscribe to the weekly Artemis email newsletter updates or get our email alerts for every article we publish.

A recent paper authored by Kensuke Molnar-Tanaka, OECD Development Centre and Hiroaki Sakamoto, Kobe University, explores how catastrophe bonds are being viewed as being more advantageous compared to taxation, when it comes to tackling the increasing rise in costs related to global natural catastrophe events.

The catastrophe bond market has shown increasing confidence in assuming wildfire risk even after the major disaster that struck the Los Angeles region of California at the start of this year, with already over $3.375 billion of cat bonds issued in 2025 that have an exposure to the wildfire peril.

A quieter July in catastrophe loss terms resulted in US insurer Allstate only reporting $184 million in pre-tax impacts from severe weather events, which has lifted the total for the current annual aggregate risk period for its catastrophe bonds to $2.174 billion so far.

According to equity analysts from Berenberg, alternative capital and insurance-linked securities instruments have become an increasingly important component of property catastrophe reinsurance limit, notably in the United States as cedants see value in diversified sourced capital.

Were the 1926 Great Miami hurricane to occur again today, analysis from catastrophe risk modelling specialists Karen Clark & Company (KCC) suggests that more than $5 trillion in insured property value would be affected by hurricane force winds, driving well over $200 billion in insurance and reinsurance market losses.

Two new private catastrophe bond, or cat bond lite deals have emerged, with $35 million of privately placed insurance-linked securities (ILS) notes issued by a Bermuda based Artex Risk Solutions owned transformer entity, Artemis has learned.

The catastrophe bond asset class, while growing strongly, is not seen as putting pricing pressure on reinsurers, with the main additional competition seen as coming from the traditional reinsurance market whose capital base has grown faster, analysts at J.P. Morgan have said.

Insurance-linked securities (ILS) is the “best asset class from a diversification perspective,” according to private bank and asset manager VP Bank AG, with the current level of compensation for taking on catastrophe risk still seen as more than adequate even as hurricane season begins.