Reinsurance

Catastrophe risk modeler EQECAT has dramatically changed its estimate of insured losses from the Tohoku, Japan earthquake to between $22 billion and $39 billion.

Natural catastrophes took a toll on Munich Re’s first-quarter earnings as the company reports a net loss of $1.36 billion, compared to net income of $695 million for the same period last year.

Using his firm’s scoring method to gauge insurers’ financial strength, ALIRT Principal David Paul notes that specialty-insurer composite scores are less volatile than composites for the entire commercial-insurance industry over the long term.

The second round of P&C earnings reports for the first quarter reveal differing strategies for the challenging workers’ comp line, struggles for regionals and rising retention rates for many primary carriers. The last trend may suggest the market is bottoming, P&C Insurance Analyst William Wilt notes.

Traditional loss reserving methods that assume past loss development patterns will repeat produced initial loss estimate that were 25 percent too low for some years during the last soft market, say Guy Carpenter, arguing for the use of modern statistical approaches.

In spite of competitive conditions in the specialty program business segment, an insurance industry analyst doesn’t see any flashing red alerts signaling major troubles ahead for program carriers so far in 2011.

Jeremy Hitzig, CEO of Distinguished Programs and 2011 president of the Target Market Program Administrators Association, describes his firm’s strategies for achieving growth and efficiency, as well as ongoing initiatives at TMPAA.

Investors greeted the insurance industry’s second week of earnings season warmly. Here are four personal observations gleaned from the information that insurers released.