A cyclone that sweeps through Jamaica, a typhoon that hits China’s Greater Bay, an earthquake that damages Google’s facilities in California — just a few examples of the growing range of hypothetical events that investors are queueing up to underwrite.
Catastrophe bonds were first created in the 1990s as a niche form of risk transfer from insurers to investors. They have expanded steadily to a market of more than $30bn in terms of debt outstanding.
On one side of the trade are insurers, and increasingly other businesses and governmental bodies wanting to protect themselves against catastrophe-linked losses. On the other are investors willing to take on that risk with their own capital, in return for annual interest payments and an investment whose performance is not typically correlated with mainstream assets.