Thursday, February 10, 2011  Extreme weather batters the
insurance industry  A few snips from a long article by Ben
Berkowitz in Reuters: …One of the biggest problems for insurers
is that they have to insure increasingly valuable properties in
risky areas that, by and large, are not being built with
disaster risk in mind. That in and of itself is driving their
risk up dramatically. When an insurer writes a policy for a
property, it takes various factors into account, such as the
property's location, its age, the propensity of the region it's
in to be affected by weather events and the potential cost of
replacing the property if it is damaged or destroyed.  Those
criteria have largely stayed the same over the years, but what
changed is the value of the properties to be insured and the
volume of them. People around the world love beachfront houses
and developers love selling them. In most places, no one stopped
to think whether building the houses was a good idea, or whether
there were appropriate building code