With the highly publicized floods, tornadoes and earthquakes suffered around the world in the first half of 2011, conventional wisdom has this year as an outlier for insurance losses.
But Bryon Ehrhart, chairman of Aon Benfield Analytics and Securities in Chicago, takes issue with the widespread use of the term “record breaking” to describe this year's catastrophes, explaining the term “is only appropriate in the local regions where the losses have occurred.
“The losses of 2011 were not 'record breaking' at all,” Ehrhart contends. “The largest event was half the size of Hurricane Katrina. And if you take the series of events, it's half the size of the series of events that occurred in 2004-2005. So while people are wont to talk about this year as unprecedented, it's really just not record breaking.”
Even in the regions affected by major catastrophic events earlier this year, the post-event reinsurance price movements “are perfectly tolerable” and remain at levels where insurers have still found reinsurance to enhance their capital position, Ehrhart says.
Though there have been June-July reinsurance price increases greater than 100 percent in post-earthquake New Zealand, and between 20 percent and 50 percent in post-tsunami Japan, both countries continue to have what Ehrhart characterizes as very efficiently priced programs that do a “great job of protecting earnings.”
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