Insurance Companies Could Face Staggering $500 Billion Loss During A Crisis-Like Downturn

Here’s one more example of how central banks’ global coordinated monetary stimulus in the wake of the financial crisis has increased systemic risk in the US: According to an analysis conducted by BlackRock, insurers are more vulnerable to a market downturn now than they were ten years ago.
The reason? Ultralow interest rates have forced insurers to venture into markets with higher yielding assets, forcing them to stomach more risk along the way. Whereas insurers once tended to adhere to only the safest types of fixed-income products – typically highly rated government and corporate debt – they’re increasingly buying exposure to risky high yield and EM products, along with illiquid private equity funds, to try and boost their earnings back to pre-crisis levels.
These products carry a potentially higher reward for insurers, but heightened risks are also omnipresent. In a downturn similar to the 2008 crisis, BlackRock estimates that US insurers’ holdings would drop by 11% – even more than they did during the crisis. Such a drop would be tantamount to $500 billion in losses.
‘The world’s largest money manager mined regulatory filings of more than 500 insurance companies and modeled their portfolios in a similar downturn. Their stockpiles – underpinning obligations to policyholders across the nation – would drop by 11 percent on average, according to its calculations. That’s significantly steeper, BlackRock estimates, than the group’s ‘mark-to-market’ losses during the depths of the crisis.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Aug 29, 2017.