(Reuters) - Hurricane Sandy appears to have easily caused more losses than last year's Hurricane Irene, but final totals will be hard to come by for some time because of the scale of the disaster, catastrophe forecasting companies said on Tuesday.
Sandy left millions without power, caused widespread flooding that may shut New York City's subways for days, and killed potentially dozens of people up and down the U.S. east coast.
RMS, one of the three primary firms used by the insurance industry to calculate disaster exposures, indicated that Sandy should outdo the roughly $4.5 billion in insured losses Irene caused after hitting the northeast in August 2011.
"Sandy event is much more severe ... and has impacted NYC to a much worse degree than Irene," RMS said in a storm report early Tuesday.
Its assessment follows that of peer Eqecat, which said late Monday that Sandy was likely to cause anywhere from $5 billion to $10 billion in insured losses and from $10 billion to $20 billion in economic losses.
If Eqecat is correct, Sandy would rank as the fifth-worst hurricane in history, based on inflation-adjusted losses, according to the Insurance Information Institute.
A better picture should emerge in the days ahead as insurers get their catastrophe teams into the most affected areas and begin making assessments. Allstate said it had more than 1,100 claims staff staged and ready to go once the storm has passed.
Eqecat and its peers are likely to refine their estimates as well. AIR Worldwide, the other large disaster modeler, is due to release its own initial estimate over the next day.
Most financial analysts expect that an insured loss of even $10 billion would have little effect on the insurance and reinsurance industries, aside from a probable hit to fourth-quarter earnings.
Shares in U.S.-listed insurers will not trade again on Tuesday because of the ongoing market closure, but in Europe insurers and reinsurers opened on relief that losses are apparently manageable.
European reinsurance analysts at Citi said Tuesday the losses were unlikely to have any impact on pricing for next year, which is expected to be flat at best in the January contract renewals due to excess industry capacity.
(Reporting by Ben Berkowitz; editing by Prudence Crowther)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/hurricane-sandy-losses-worse-irene-disaster-forecasters-130841795.html
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If you?re wondering how or why I didn?t post this sooner, well, I didn?t forget so much as I got behind and then stuff happened, like it always does and May turned into July, night for day then September snowballed into the last day of summer and now there are pumpkins everywhere to contend with. ?What started off somewhere around December last year went the way of all good intentions and wayward resolutions, calendar pages turning making you forget more than you can remember. ?Well, lets just say I?ve had a few bumps in the road and all those reasons aside, I?ve got a lot of catching up to do so why not make up a day for your celebrating like Christmas for Halloween, Easter in the Winter, Louis Riel Day?in November,?Dragon Boat Festival?all day in April ? like Above The Line?s May birthday in October. ?Besides, there?s only six months until we do it all again anyway!
I?m not sure what I was thinking when I first cooked this idea up, having no way of knowing exactly how much work was going to be involved. ?I didn?t know what the format was going to be but?I knew I didn?t want to use the gimmicks that are often overused, like stars and thumbs and popcorn tubs. ?I thought the best plan would be to try to look at reviews from the inside out, to capitalize on my experiences as a filmmaker to make reviews more practical, less plot point analysis and more about the experience of the movies. ?I used to think there weren?t that many people doing it until I found lists to the contrary, plenty of people with big ideas and opinions and at first that made me feel like what could I contribute? ?Then I realized there aren?t a lot of filmmakers who write reviews ? thus Above The Line was born. ?Once I got over opening Pandora?s box and accepting the fact there was no way of putting it back, I bit down hard, braced for the inevitable collision, and hung on for dear life! ?I?ve?been stumbling ever since to be quite honest but it?s been truly rewarding (mostly) and almost always (very often) exciting. ?More than anything I want to help people kinda like the way old football greats trade in their helmets and athletic supporters for desks and microphones, sideline quarterbacks and studio commentators. ? A lot of these guys have real staying power because they?ve been down there in the muck and the mire and when they start talking about it, writing about it, explaining it, you want to trust them ? or maybe they just have a funny way of being there again and you can connect in a way that?s different from?other guys who?ve never even walked onto a set, much less been involved in making a movie come to life. ?They say writer?s write and filmmakers make movies and sometimes they blog about the collision of the two.
I hit my busiest day recently, on July 29th with 555 unique visitors to my blog, somewhere between The Dark Knight review, Christopher Nolan Master & Commander of Cinema, and Batman: America?s James Bond I started averaging 300 people a day and it?s been steadily climbing since.? I have big plans and hope to keep all this up but anyone who maintains a regular blog or writes for a living can tell you, it?s all one post away from the next or nothing.? I hit an all time high month in August with 9770 visitors and if all things go well I?ll end this year doubled what I had last year and maintain the momentum of doubling each year and so on and so on until I reach my goal of a world-wide audience.? I keep juggling my other writing as well, a memoir that I?ve spent too many years talking about and the film scripts that continue to change, stay the same, mature and refine.? Mostly I keep going for the same reason I got started, to challenge the notions of what movie reviews can be and should be, if not always then more times than anything.
Above The Line: Practical Movie Reviews has quite a diverse audience with traffic coming in from all over the place. ?Of course my biggest audience is right here in the good old USA, which makes sense I guess, followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, India and Turkey.? The Philippines, Australia (thanks Rodney, Fernby Films), Germany (Peter), Mexico (GR?), Greece, Hong Kong and Brazil (Pauola?).? Poland, Netherlands, Egypt, Singapore and Hungary all tie, plus Argentina, Sweden, Malaysia, Taiwan and Israel are plenty close.? The Russian Federation sounds so novel, have to throw a shot out to Portugal for all my people, the places I?ve been and need to go; there?s Georgia (not that one) and Serbia, a bunch of others tied for just barely coming by, then Italy of course and France (Pat), New Zealand (is that you?) and way down there, almost not at all, it?s Latvia, Estonia, Moldova, Costa Rica, Bahamas, Puerto Rico and Kyrgyzstan ? and actually, almost a hundred others.? I have to put this birthday back slapping to rest now so I can get on with my next movie review.? Recently it?s been The Hunger Games and the Indie character flick Loosies, the other day it was the late Tony Scott?s The Hunger for old times sake, Days of Thunder with Tom Cruise, the yucky Five Year Engagement that I don?t recommend, and a hapless return to the three-picture atrocities of George Lucas before scurrying around the find something, anything to erase the memory.? Up next is anyone?s guess and most of all my doing.? For now I still rent from a little movie shack down the road, a place for lost souls and cinephiles, everyday people caught between grocery shopping and pharmacy visits and chain store secret shopping trips.
Movies remind us of the magic of escapism and high adventure, of getting away and reminiscing, of the child we are and used to be gathered in the dark for the next go at dreaming and pretending and imagining what dreams may come when last we look up into the sky and ask ourselves where will we go this time? ?I?ll be here, man, because well, the dude abides writing about my high-colored times, low ones too, marveling at the movies and you. ?See you soon.
Genealogy website Ancestry.com -- which filed for an IPO back in 2009 -- has agreed to be acquired by an investor group led by European private equity firm Permira in a deal said to be worth about $1.6 billion, or $32 per share, the Wall Street Journal is reporting. The paper cites "people familiar with the matter" who point to expansion in Western Europe as a goal.