Uncertainties cloud horizon for marine insurers

I DID a double take when reading the International Union of Marine Insurance (IUMI) 2021 analysis of the global marine insurance market, the IUMI Stats Report.

It took a second reading of a sentence for me to realise that "nat cats" has passed into standard insurance phraseology to mean "natural catastrophes". I will return to that in a while.

It may seem to be either too early to try to sum up 2021, or a bit late to be looking at last year's figures. Actually, the report is partly based on 2020 information, and partly on more recent data because much insurance business works on a July-start basis.