MarketScout: Rates up 3%

That’s a touch better than 2% last month. More here. The Dallas insurance exchange also notes that rates in the non-admitted market are trending up. Usually in a hard market, admitted insurers abandon the non-admitted market, which is where the hard-to-write risks reside. That action allows non-admitted rates to accelerate.

Me me me

Contingencies publishes my article on rate monitors.

Insuring the Titanic

With the 100th anniversary of the Titanic’s sinking today, there’s a great post at Willis’ blog regarding the ship’s insurance placement: The rate was 15 shillings per cent (0.75%), costing White Star Line £7,500 to insure each vessel. Today’s rates for a comparable risk would be significantly lower. More interesting, is the surprisingly high deductible [...]

SOA declares war on CAS

Feel free to comment on how my headline exaggerates, but first read: The Society of Actuaries (SOA) will begin offering an exam track in general (property-casualty) insurance in 2013, ensuring that the SOA is providing options covering all actuarial disciplines to earning the Fellow of the Society of Actuaries (FSA) designation. The SOA Board of [...]

The latest in predictive modeling

I know this is a big story, because my Mom railed on about it this weekend. She’s not an Allstate customer, and she doesn’t live in Oklahoma.: If you’re a lousy driver, are you also more likely to be a mishap-prone homeowner? Allstate Corp.believes there’s a correlation. The Northbrook-based company confirmed it has begun considering [...]

A.M. Best: 107.5 combined for 2011

Shorter Best: Cats made it a lackluster year: $44B in cats (10.1 points of CR), more than double the $20B (4.6 points) posted in 2010. Note that even given last year’s fairly normal cat levels, the CR would still have exceeded 100. $33.9B underwriting loss is third worst ever, behind 2001 ($56.4B) and 2002 ($34.3B). [...]

MarketScout: January rates up 1%

Here’s a breakout by line of business:  

The Week in a Minute, Jan. 27, 2012

In the next four years, 70% chance of magnitude 7 earthquake in Japan, Wall Street Journal reports. Conning projects a 104 industry combined ratio for 2010 and an ROE around 5%. More 2012 projections here. In a sort of earnings-season kickoff, Travelers’ net fell 31% from the year-ago quarter, hurt by lower investment income. Favorable [...]

2012 Projections Roundup

With the new year comes a lot of analysts telling us what will happen over the next 12 months. I’ve created a page to round them up. If anyone sees a report I missed, let me know in comments.

CIAB: Rates up 2.8% in Q4

Workers comp rates up 7.5%. Commercial property up 5.7%. Accompanying the press release is this handy chart: