Even after a number of significant disasters so far in 2010, including the Chilean earthquake and the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, rate hikes are more the exception than the rule in the soft global reinsurance market, key players observe, with no bottom in sight–although more questions are being raised when underwriting long-tail business.

“Unfortunately, we did have some catastrophe activity in the first half of the year,” noted Anne Marie Roberts, president and chief operating officer of BMS Intermediaries in Dallas. “If we have some in the second half, you might see things hardening, but right now nothing is hardening, other than maybe the Chilean rates–which are up 50-to-75 percent.”

For the most part, she said, the property market has an abundance of capital, which means cedents are buying less reinsurance and taking higher retentions.

“So the market is not hardening,” she concluded. “I don't think it will harden any time very soon, unless we have, again, earthquake activity in the second half of this year.”

With casualty books, Ms. Roberts observed continuing softening on the professional side as well.

“It is amazing to me, but we continue to see it,” she said. “I place reinsurance for a captive company, and obviously captives and risk retention groups try to keep steady pricing throughout, so they're there when the market hardens for their members.”

However, she noted that compared to the captive and RRG rates, “we're seeing the commercial market as much as 50 percent lower on long-tail professional–which is ridiculously inadequate.”

While this doesn't apply as much to managed care exposures, she said, “specifically, not-for-profit D&O is dirt-cheap in the market.”

Meanwhile, workers' compensation rates continue to decline, she said, adding that reinsurers offered price relief on some working layers of workers' comp at the July 1 renewals.

General liability, she said, is still relatively soft and “was pretty much flat at July 1 renewals.”

The BP oil spill, she said, is “still a question mark. First they have to see what kind of policy language they have as far as contaminants and pollution–so [the loss] could be enormous, [in the] billions of dollars. But they aren't sure from an insurance or reinsurance standpoint what the impact is yet.”

Ms. Roberts added that the market has “to see how far this [spill loss] goes and know what the language is in their various policies.”

With pricing still decreasing as of July 1 renewals, Ms. Roberts said reinsurers are looking for clients that are financially stable.

“If they see the ratings and abundant capital in a client, they'll continue to write it at the same rates, because they feel they're adequate based on the client's financial picture,” she said.

However, she added, “what they're staying away from is a lot of the Florida 'takeout' companies that pay one claim and then they're gone. So they're really looking at balance sheets before they support a client. If the balance sheets are strong enough, reinsurers feel they're adequate the way they're set right now.”

On the long-tail casualty side, she reported, rates are low, but “who knows when they're going to feel the effects?”

Pricing for some companies, she added, is “definitely not adequate for the kind of cover they're writing, but they're not going to realize that until years down the road, when some of these D&O claims start cropping up–and they will.”

Ms. Roberts said the timing depends on the policy, “because policy language, the contract, is everything. Until they really can zero in on what they've written for whom, when the losses start coming in, I think we're going to feel the effect in a big way.”

She pointed out that in the mid-1980s, “there was no D&O capacity. I can't believe we don't learn from our mistakes.” From 1985 to 1988, she said, “you couldn't get D&O after all the savings and loans went bust and the financial institutions were getting 300-to-500 percent rate increases.”

Now, she noted, “we're just doing exactly the same thing we did before,” joking that “the insurance industry hates to make money.”

While not-for-profit board directors may be less liable because they don't benefit financially, directors of BP will be scrutinized about what they had to gain by making certain decisions, she said, adding that they also may be questioned about what they didn't do.

“Those claims will come–they have to come,” she said, pointing out that the Gulf Coast is “just recovering from Katrina.”

What is evident is that “it's going to take forever to uncover the cause of this [spill],” according to Ms. Roberts. “Obviously marine excess is going to go up dramatically because of this, and so is any kind of offshore drilling coverage. And because of the effects on the environment, it will be harder to predict [damage from] storms coming in.”

Andrew Marcell, chief executive officer of global practices and head of placement strategy for Guy Carpenter in London, agreed that as a general trend in 2010, the global market continues to decline. Reinsurance terms and conditions, he said, “improved for our clients, or if you're a reinsurer, worsened in terms of price.”

Unless something unexpected happens, such as a catastrophic loss, he added, “we don't see any fundamental change in the direction of the insurance or the reinsurance market at this time.”

Echoing these sentiments was Chris Klein, director of reinsurance market management for Guy Carpenter.

“I think it's fair to say that on every renewal point this year prices were down for reinsurance,” he agreed. “Increases are only being 'enjoyed,' if that's the right word, where there has been specific loss experience–obviously things like the Chile earthquake and offshore marine as a result of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.”

He said concerns linger in the areas of professional liability, trade credit and surety–”particularly in Europe, an area that has some tightness of capacity as well.”

Beyond that, however, the market remains soft, according to Mr. Klein, who said that “despite the cat losses in the first half of the year–which most people estimate at about $22 billion–the reinsurance sector has excess capital.”

With deepwater drilling, there were two losses, Mr. Marcell said, citing the Deepwater Horizon and an incident off the coast of Venezuela. “So on the insurance side the rates are up between 30- and 40 percent,” he noted. “That's one piece where you've got a specific cover of large losses.”

The Aban Pearl Venezuela gas rig loss, he noted, involves a broader spectrum of the international market. “That's why you're seeing the rate increases across the globe in deepwater drilling,” he explained.

Mr. Marcell observed that the market in Chile has hardened and that “prices clearly have responded to that. We have seen some reinsurers increasing their loss estimates.”

However, while Chile was a “huge loss [and] it was a huge earthquake,” he said, “we haven't seen reinsurance programs collapsing as a result. I think the models have responded reasonably well.”

The caveat, however, is that “the tail is always longer on earthquake than hurricane catastrophes,” he warned.

He also pointed out that superior engineering in Chile has meant that many buildings withstood the quake, so that loss of life was not exceptional. “But because buildings were still standing doesn't mean there was do damage to them,” he hastily added. “That's one of the complicated issues that will emerge during the aftermath of that loss.”

Chile's big loss, according to Mr. Marcell, has had a major impact on the Chilean marketplace, where “a lot of facultative reinsurance is bought. So you'll see rate increases there–upward of 40 percent–but quite a lot of accounts have been extended while the risk-takers evaluate their overall capital position and figure out if they are going to buy facultative or expand the usage of their treaties to capture more of the risks they're underwriting.”

The bigger pressure in Chile, however, is most likely on proportional reinsurance covers, he said. A few reinsurers, he explained, have experienced significant losses “from the proportional reinsurance, relative to their portfolio in Latin America. So there is some pressure there to convert those to excess-of-loss.”

The overall impact of treaty renewals in Chile related to property accounts, according to Mr. Marcell, was rate hikes between 30- and 50 percent.

Nevertheless, “you would have expected these losses to have had a broader impact across the Latin American marketplace,” he said, adding that in fact “it hasn't had much impact on the rest of the Latin American marketplace, except that the continued deterioration of pricing has been abated. But it hasn't caused to this point any rate increases in the region outside of Chile.”

The financial state of the reinsurance market, Mr. Marcell added, is “considerably stronger than it was last year, which was much stronger than it was the year before. Overall, the reinsurance market looks healthy.”

What's more, he explained, “reinsurers still believe there is a margin in the business they are participating in, so I don't think that by any stretch of the imagination are we bottoming out.”

Mr. Klein said that in the medium term, there are “theoretically significant pressures on companies to get their prices up–such as low investment returns–that really should be putting pressure on underwriters, because companies are increasingly having to make that margin on the underwriting account.”

He said that in some countries there are inflationary pressures as well–particularly in the United Kingdom–while in other countries there are deflationary pressures.

“You have to ask about the continuing contribution to earnings from prior-year loss reserves,” warned Mr. Klein, noting that companies have been releasing “substantial amounts of money in the last two-to-three years from their back years.”

But overall, he concluded, the fact of the matter is that “at the moment we have excess capital, and we haven't had losses of the magnitude to burn it away yet.”

Special Reports /

Global Re Market Remains Stable But Soft, With Prices Still Plummeting

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