Re: Re: "an act of war" & insurance payments

["Andrew Hagen" <xah@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Another estimate puts the insurance costs at $5 billion. In any case,
the insurance industry will be glad to learn that the owner of the WTC,
the Port Authority of NY and NJ, insured only one of the towers.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=93613

Life insurance benefits will also be costly. At this point, however,
I'm willing to stick my neck out and estimate that our worst fears are
somewhat unjustified. I think most of the workers at the WTC might have
escaped in time. In all, between 3,000 and 12,500 will have died from
the attacks.

Of course, that figure is staggering. If the estimate is accurate, it
will be much better, however, than the 100,000 lives that the hijack
conspiracy deliberately put at risk. (The WTC has about 50,000 workers
and 110,000 visitors every day. The Pentagon building has about 24,000
workers.)

Don't worry about the insurance industry. If a few small companies go
bankrupt, that won't affect the industry as a whole. If a big insurance
company has a bad quarter, they'll just raise premiums or liquidate
some assets.

Andrew Hagen
xah@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

On Wed, 12 Sep 2001 11:03:16 -0700, Jim Devine wrote:

>At 09:43 AM 9/12/01 -0700, you wrote:
>>If this talk of an "act of war" leads to the War
>>Powers Act being invoked, does that let the insurance
>>companies escape from making payments on the damage?
>
>isn't that one of the key roles for declarations of disaster areas?
>
>>My reading of the Chron this morning suggests that the
>>total hit for insurance companies is on the order of
>>$20 billion-- by far the largest insurance bill in
>>history. Are the companies capitalized enough to meet
>>the payments?
>
>probably not. Hurricanes in Florida had a similar effect on insurance
>companies a few years ago.
>
>Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
>
>