Despite estimates that Hurricane Katrina may become the most damaging U.S. hurricane, one analyst suggested it is a time to buy shares in insurers whose stock prices sagged with the arrival of the storm.
"We would be buyers of p-c insurance companies on any weakness in the stocks today, given that the impact to the stocks tends to [be] of greater magnitude than would [be] implied by the damage to insurers' balance sheets," wrote Jay Gelb, Lehman Brothers Equity Research analyst.
Hurricane modelers have estimated that damage from Katrina==which hit Louisiana today as a Category 4 storm on the five point Saffir-Simpson scale==could be larger than Hurricane Andrew in 1992, which caused $22 billion in insured damage, and was the most damaging hurricane in history.
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