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S&P Top 150 Reinsurers: A good year, but maybe not good enough
01 March 2008
Standard & Poor's figures of the top 150 reinsurers in 2006 reveal a very profitable year. But, given this represented the peak of the cycle, Verena Horne asks whether reinsurers made the most of a year where everything fell into place, or whether they blew their chance to set themselves up for the soft market.
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S&P Top 150 Reinsurers
reinsurance
soft market
munich re
swiss re
Standard & Poor's
softening rates
hurricane katrina
combined ratio
Ominous talk of softening rates and signs of a downturn in the cycle belies the fact that less than two years ago reinsurance rates were sky high on the back of the hugely destructive 2004 and 2005 North American hurricane seasons. This means rates are coming down from record peaks.
Looking at Standard & Poor's (S&P) statistics on the top 150 reinsurers of 2006, it is predictable then that most recorded stunning results – a great improvement on the year before.
"Undoubtedly it was a very good year," says Peter Grant, analyst at S&P. "It's not surprising that it's a substantially better year than 2005 given the improvement in pricing seen after hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma, and because it was a relatively benign loss year."
Prices for US property-catastrophe business peaked in June/July 2006, and despite predictions of high activity, the 2006 hurricane season proved to be a damp...
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