They do this by insuring "total business risks" - including business
failures or a disappointing bottom line. Swiss Re has been issuing such
policies in the last 3 years. Other insurers - such as Zurich - move
into project financing. They guarantee a loan and then finance it based
on their own insurance policy as a collateral.
Paradoxically, as financial markets move away from "portfolio
insurance" (a form of self-hedging) following the 1987 crash on Wall
Street - leading insurers and their clients are increasingly
contemplating "self-insurance" through captives and other subterfuges.
The blurring of erstwhile boundaries between insurance and capital is
most evident in Alternative Risk Transfer (ART) financing. It is a
hybrid between creative financial engineering and medieval mutual or ad
hoc insurance. It often involves "captives" - insurance or reinsurance
firms owned by their insured clients and located in tax friendly climes
such as Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Barbados, Ireland, and in the USA:
Vermont, Colorado, and Hawaii.
Companies - from manufacturers to insurance agents - are willing to
retain more risk than ever before. ART constitutes less than one tenth
the global insurance market according to "The Economist" - but almost
one third of certain categories, such as the US property and casualty
market, according to an August 2000 article written by Albert Beer of
America Re.
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