Here are the ten most popular news articles, week ending 30th August 2020, covering catastrophe bonds, ILS, reinsurance capital and related risk transfer topics.To ensure you never miss a thing or get our email alerts for every article we publish..

Hurricane Laura has now been downgraded to a tropical depression as it moves over Arkansas but it has taken more than 24 hours from landfall for its sustained winds to drop below storm strength, with the significant footprint of the large storm likely to make damage assessment take time.Hurricane Laura’s impacts wind and storm surge impacts in Texas and Louisiana are estimated to have caused insured losses of between $8 billion and $12 billion, according to CoreLogic.Entry of the so-called tech giants into the insurance and reinsurance market has always been a hot topic and today it’s been announced that a Google unit is entering the employer stop-loss insurance space with the backing and support of reinsurance giant Swiss Re.

According to industry sources, catastrophe risk modeller AIR Worldwide’s preliminary estimate of insurance and reinsurance market losses from hurricane Laura was pegged in a range from $4.8 billion to as high as $9.2 billion.After canvassing a number of insurance-linked securities (ILS) investment fund managers and end-investors for their views on possible loss impacts due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the majority strongly believe that impacts from the business interruption issue will only be minimal to their ILS strategies and ILS portfolios.A number of the major property and casualty insurers that are seen as most exposed to hurricane Laura’s impacts on the Gulf Coast region could tap into their reinsurance programs, should the major hurricane prove particularly impactful.

Picture the scene, it’s August 2020 and major hurricane Laura is in the Gulf of Mexico moving over some of the warmest waters on the planet and forecast to intensify into a Category 4 storm before slamming into Louisiana and Texas, with Galveston Bay and Houston still perilously close to the cone of uncertainty.While hurricane Laura was intensifying rapidly on its path towards the Gulf Coast, insurtech firm Tremor Technologies ran a series of industry loss warranty (ILW) auctions, but no trades were made as the market assumed the loss would not be significant enough to warrant the added coverage.The decline in available retrocessional reinsurance capacity is being exacerbated by ongoing fears over potential losses related to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, on top of the added issue of pre-emptive trapping of collateralised ILS capacity, according to the rating agency.

In spite of the overhang of a global pandemic, catastrophe bond and insurance-linked securities (ILS) issuance was robust in the first half of the year, leading reinsurance giant Swiss Re to be very optimistic that market capacity will rebound.This is not every article published on Artemis during the last week, just the most popular, some of which were published over a week ago..

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