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 [...]

East Coast quake: Some facts

Epicenter near Charlottesville VA, 5.9 with a depth of “more than three miles.” That’s the worst quake since 1897 in Virginia, not as bad as the 6.3 in New Zealand in February and far short of the 9.0 quake in Japan. (Each increase of a single point is an increase of about 30-fold in shaking [...]

New quake estimate: Enough to harden market, not crush it

Towers Watson weighs in: $20 billion to $45 billion for the quake and tsunami. But the tragedy “will not have a devastating effect on either the capital of the Japanese insurance industry or the international reinsurance market.” The range is wider and, overall, higher than either Eqecat or AIR estimates. Unlike AIR and Eqecat, the [...]

AIR’s new loss estimate: Still twice Eqecat’s (apples-to-apples)

Late Thursday, AIR Worldwide tightened its estimate of Japan insurance losses. Old estimate: $15B to $35B. New estimate: $20B to $30B. These line up a bit better with Eqecat’s estimate of $12B to $25B, which I recapped here – at least on the surface. When you dig down, AIR still projects losses twice as high [...]

Behind the ‘seismological Black Swan’

Sat in on Thursday’s Eqecat briefing regarding the Japan quake. Highlights: First, Eqecat, as I tweeted earlier, has labeled this a “seismological black swan.” The particular plates that shifted were considered too old and too slow moving to generate anything bigger than 8.2. The graph below, cribbed from Eqecat’s presentation helps explain: Each dot in [...]

The structure and strength of Japanese residential insurance

This morning, I blogged at I.I.I. about how earthquake insurance works in Japan. I want to add a bit to that, mainly to say residential insurance claims won’t hit the private market too hard, if at all. But if losses get big enough, things could get dicey for the quasi-governmental Japan Earthquake Reinsurance. As I [...]

AIR: Insured quake loss between $14.5B and $34.6B

Significantly, that’s not counting the tsunami. AIR’s press release points out that you can’t just add a tsunami estimate to its quake estimate. That would be double-counting a lot of buildings that were destroyed by the quake, then swamped by the tsunami. A tsunami estimate is in the works, the company indicates. AIR says it [...]

S&P monitoring Japan-linked cat bonds; no change for now

Via FT’s Alphaville (h/t RiskMarket News on twitter), S&P reports Japan-linked cat bonds are unthreatened, at least for now. Reuters with more (h/t Reactionsnet on twitter): Munich Re has two bonds exposed to pure Japanese earthquake risk. The world’s biggest reinsurer placed a $250 million catastrophe bond dubbed Midori Ltd in October 2007 for the [...]

Early assessment of Japan insurance/tsunami losses

Insurance stocks sank in Europe on news of the Japanese earthquake/tsunami. Bloomberg has an article here, but updates will make it obsolete by 11:30 a.m. Friday. Post Online quotes a Jefferies International analyst projecting a $10B insurance loss from the Japan earthquake. WSJ has a rundown of insurance losses. Most companies (sensibly) say it’s too [...]

NZ earthquake: How bad?

This week’s earthquake in Christchurch could be the worst insurance catastrophe since Hurricane Ike hit Texas in 2008, according to early reports. AIR estimates insured losses between US$3.5B and US$8B. JP Morgan estimates $12B. (Ike came in at $12.6B in the U.S. alone, $20B including all Caribbean basin countries, with all numbers updated for inflation). [...]