This book is an edited collection by leading insurance historians, examining the historical role of reinsurance (the insurance of insurers) in the insurance markets of eight countries: USA, Netherlands, Sweden, France, Spain, Italy, Mexico and Japan. All the contributors are experts in their field and have widely published in insurance history, providing the reader with new insights into the insurance and economic history of these countries. In particular, this is the first book to explore the reinsurance markets in the USA, Netherlands, France, Italy and Mexico. This book will be of interest to economic and business historians, as well as insurance practitioners with an interest in the history of their industry.
The insurance sector is a significant part of the U.S. economy (with one estimate putting it at 7 percent of GDP) and an essential asset protection tool for American families and businesses. This book details strengths and weaknesses of current insurance regulatory systems (prudential and marketplace), providing considerations for determining where and how to modernize, and offering a way forward to increase the effectiveness of insurance oversight in the United States. Insurers operating in the United States rely on reinsurers, both foreign and domestic, to support the issuance of new policies, to minimize fluctuations in loss experience, and to limit and diversify individual and portfolio risks, particularly in the case of catastrophes and natural disasters. This book also summarizes the history of reinsurance as a product and an industry, and outlines the various important functions of reinsurance. The book emphasizes that global reinsurers are vital to U.S. insurers and thus important for the general economic prosperity of the United States, including through enhanced availability and affordability of insurance.
We seem to be living at a time when insurance is strained to the breaking point. From hurricanes and earthquakes to terrorist attacks and threats of nuclear devastation, enormous risks to life and property; and accompanying liabilities; proliferate on an unprecedented scale. Insurer insolvency is not yet common, but it is not unusual either. And at the root of such failures often lies the compound failure of uncollectable reinsurance. This important book proposes that a significant part of the emerging insurance crisis results from inadequate regulation of reinsurance. In a detailed and cogent analysis of what an effective regulatory regime for reinsurance must entail, the author examines such factors as the following: direct supervision of reinsurers versus supervision of reinsurance policies models from developed countries (US, UK, EU) and international organisations (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, International Association of Insurance Supervisors) the importance of taking legal and economic differences into account while applying models the problem of local protectionism, especially in developing countries the dismantling of trade barriers in the reinsurance industry global harmonization of reinsurance regulation the role of reinsurance intermediaries finite risk reinsurance insurance-linked securities. The author's concluding chapter presents an essential legal infrastructure that allows for efficiency, security, and individual market characteristics. Professor Wang then applies this framework to the Taiwanese insurance market, demonstrating convincingly how his proposed regime can solve specific problems while respecting Taiwan's distinct market environment. As a meticulously considered appraisal of, and solution to, a world problem that is growing quickly and uncontrollably, Reinsurance Regulation will be of immense value to lawyers, professors, academics, and officials who deal with any facet of economic law.
Reinsurance was a global business from the start the method of spreading and balancing risks in international markets. But this also meant that reinsurance was more heavily exposed to global trends than many other industries. This book gives detailed accounts on how reinsurers dealt with all these challenges.
Reinsurance is a market that provides cover for the devastating consequences of unpredictable events such as Hurricane Katrina, or the Tohoku earthquake, underpinning society's capacity to rebuild after the unthinkable happens. This book fleshes out how this important and quirky financial market works.
Reinsurance is an invisible service industry which enables insurance companies to insure more risks and to make better use of their resources. Until recently, reinsurers were only known to a small minority outside the insurance community. Major disasters, especially those caused by natural catastrophes, have increasingly brought the industry into the spotlight. Yet what is perceived today by a wider public still only represents a fraction of the industry, and the mechanisms of reinsurance to deal with global risk exposure are virtually unknown. The Value of Risk provides an overview of how today's reinsurance industry developed. It investigates for the first time the role of reinsurers in a changing risk, economic, and market environment. Harold James explains the fundamental principles of insuring and outlines the evolution of the industry in his introductory essay. In Part I, Peter Borscheid describes in detail the global spread of modern insurance, which emerged in the late eighteenth century amidst ideas of rationalism which attempted to quantify risk in monetary terms, the setbacks it encountered, and how the market environment changed over time. Professional reinsurance emerged with the rise in insured risks in the industrialising mid-nineteenth century. By the time the San Francisco Earthquake happened in 1906 the reinsurance industry had become well established and showed a remarkable ability to deal collectively with the catastrophe. David Gugerli describes in Part II how the industry as a whole dealt with such challenges but also the numerous exposures to a changing risk landscape. Against this background, in Part III Tobias Straumann examines the history of the Swiss Reinsurance Company, founded in 1863, providing a fascinating example of how professional risk taking was developed over the last 150 years.
In 1994 a Reinsurance Working Party was set up by AIDA (Association Internationale de Droit des Assurances) with the aim of producing a series of comparative reports considering how particular aspects of reinsurance law operate in a range of jurisdictions.
Reinsurance is a financial market that trades in the risk of unpredictable and devastating disasters - such as Hurricane Katrina, the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, and the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre. Such disasters are increasing in both frequency and severity, with the cost of their losses mounting rapidly. Reinsurance insures insurance companies, enabling them to pay claims arising from these losses. It is thus a market mechanism that is a critical part of the social and economic safety net, helping to pick up the pieces after disasters. Yet, how is the risk of such disasters calculated and traded in a global market? This book brings to life the reinsurance market through vivid real-life tales that draw from an ethnographic, "fly-on-the-wall" study of the global reinsurance industry over three annual cycles. The authors shadowed underwriters around the world as they traded risks through multiple disasters. For instance, this book takes readers into the desperate hours of pricing Japanese risks during March 2011, while the devastating aftermath of the Tohoku earthquake is unfolding. To show how the market works, the book offers authentic tales gathered from observations of reinsurers in Bermuda, Lloyd's of London, Continental Europe and SE Asia as they evaluate, price and compete for different risks as part of their everyday practice. Understanding how this market for disasters works has never been more critical given the impact of climate change and increased global connectivity, where a flood in one country can trigger losses to supply chains around the world. The authors develop a novel concept of how global markets work, which advances scholarship and challenges current thinking about how financial markets trade in intangible assets such as risk. This book will be useful to readers interested in markets for disasters, insurance, reinsurance and financial markets, and academics interested in the practice of financial markets specifically or the practice of strategy and organizations generally.
