financial market

Contingent capital has been back on our radar recently thanks to the market rumours suggesting that reinsurer Swiss Re has been arranging a marketing roadshow for a contingent convertible bond issuance recently. The first time we wrote about contingent capital on Artemis it was not with reference to reinsurers however, it was discussing whether contingent […]

Just how uncorrelated catastrophe bonds and insurance-linked securities are with the wider financial markets is a point worth considering. We’re currently living in a time of unprecedented financial and economic upheaval due to the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis and U.S. economic issues, with many countries now officially in deepening recessions and the very real spectre […]

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 […]

One of the big things to come out of the recent financial market turmoil is a desire to have better back stops for the banking system and to find a way to prevent the need for breaking up banks that fail. Many ideas have been mooted, including catastrophe bonds (as we’ve written about previously), with […]

We’ve mentioned in the past the potential for catastrophe bonds to be utilised by the banking systems as a way to protect against the failures we’ve seen due to the global financial meltdown. Now, the International Monetary Fund has published a working paper which suggests exactly that as a possible left-field approach to protecting financial […]