A new wrinkle in IBNR

Behind its firewall, SNL writes about reinsurers establishing cat IBNR reserves that aren’t tied to an event: Typically, reinsurers establish IBNR reserves to cover future payments on individual losses that have occurred but have yet to be reported or reported losses that have not been recorded in full. Unallocated IBNR reserves are a slightly different [...]

File under emerging cat risk

Offshore windmills pose no environmental or socioeconomic risk, according to the Interior Department. But the department didn’t consider this: In certain risky offshore regions off the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, there is a high probability that at least one turbine would be destroyed by hurricanes within 20 years, and a smaller chance that half the [...]

Thai flood losses by company

A handy chart from PropertyCasualty360:

Q1 quakes continue to pound Partner Re

Though earnings season is in full swing (see here), preliminary reports on cat losses trickle in, so I keep updating that page, too. Most have been small, so I haven’t flagged the updates. But today Partner delivers a doozy: The Company expects to record $136 million in losses associated with changes in estimates related to [...]

Allstate: $1.08B in Q3 cats

Allstate announced $1.08B in cat losses, pre-tax in Q3, $500M from Hurricane Irene. Other announcements are on my page at the link.

Preliminary cat reports – an update

Montpelier pegs Q3 cat losses at $80M $70M. Details on the web page at the top left corner of the blog.

Preliminary cat estimates start trickling in

Over the past few days, insurers have started reporting their preliminary Q3 cat losses – softening the blow for earnings season, which starts around the end of the month. So far a handful of companies (Alterra, Endurance, Cincinnati and a few others) have reported almost $650M in cat losses. This isn’t too surprising, with Hurricane [...]

9/11 remembered

I saw my reflection in the windows of the North Tower as I walked past, five minutes before the first plane hit. I wrote an article for the company magazine for my employer then, QBE. It’s pretty long, but, honest, it’s worth your time. Here’s a link. Sorry for the scanned pdf format.

Did Irene fizzle?

Daily Beast media columnist Howard Kurtz leads the charge against how the media covered Hurricane Irene: . . . the apocalypse that cable television had been trumpeting had failed to materialize. And at 9 a.m., you could almost hear the air come out of the media’s hot-air balloon of constant coverage when Hurricane Irene was [...]

Irene’s predecessors: Gloria and Hugo

Here’s a storm track of 1985 Hurricane Gloria, via Stormpulse: Eerie, huh? Strolling around the internet, I’ve seen a lot of Northeasterners pooh-poohing Irene’s threat, reasoning that Gloria hit about the same way. Gloria didn’t destroy much, so Irene and its lower windspeeds will be a popgun by contrast. Here‘s Wikipedia on Gloria: Gloria’s high [...]