March 2011/4

Munich Re placed $100mn of US and European wind cover in the cat bond market just days after the 11 March Japanese earthquake and tsunami threw the (re)insurance markets into turmoil

Reinsurance broker Aon Benfield traded over $100mn of Japanese earthquake industry loss warranties (ILW) shortly after the 11 March catastrophe, sister publication Trading Risk has learned

Cedants to around $1.4bn of outstanding Japan earthquake-exposed cat bonds face an agonising wait to discover if coverage is available, as risk modellers calculate the parametric values that trigger the majority of the notes

Analysts and industry commentators typically turn to history when trying to evaluate what kind of an impact a catastrophe event will have on market dynamics

Berkshire Hathaway's stock lost $6.3bn in value in the week following the Japan earthquake - before trading up later in March

While (re)insurers are slowly getting to grips with the scale of property losses from the Japan earthquake, the wildcat element is contingent business interruption (CBI) cover

Lloyd's is unlikely to declare officially a loss estimate for Japan until May at the earliest but that has not stopped the speculation as to what the market's ultimate net loss will be from the disaster

In the week immediately following the 11 March Japanese earthquake the shares of the quoted global specialty (re)insurers fell by an average of 5.51 percent

Regardless of whether the Japanese quake costs international (re)insurers $15bn or $30bn it will take cat reinsurers years to earn back the cost of the 2010 and Q1 2011 losses

After "K", "R", and "W" had done their worst in 2005, the then-independent reinsurance broker Benfield coined a phrase to describe the "hard on top, soft underneath" market that followed at the 1 January 2006 renewals and beyond

Ascot founder Martin Reith and unknown financial backers are in takeover talks with Chaucer, The Insurance Insider can reveal

Start-up collateralised reinsurer Catco has raised $7.4mn of new capital from a share issue in an early sign of the market "reloading" after the recent roll-call of brutal cat losses