Marsh

Marsh is a global insurance brokerage and risk advisory firm, part of Marsh McLennan, that places and prices commercial and marine insurance for shipowners and other corporate clients operating in high-risk regions. It operates in more than 130 countries and traces its origins back over a century, and its market commentary on shipping and war-risk insurance is regularly cited by trade press covering conflict zones and other areas of elevated commercial risk.

Marsh has been a market source on the cost of the war for shipping. War-risk hull insurance for vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz now runs at 3 to 10 per cent of hull value, against 0.25 per cent before the war, according to figures the firm supplied.

That premium range reflects insurers continuously repricing the risk of missile, drone and mine threats to shipping through the Strait as the war has widened to draw in strikes on Gulf ports, power plants and airports, rather than a single fixed war-risk surcharge set once at the war's outset.

The jump is one of the clearest market measures of how the conflict has raised the price of moving oil and cargo through the Gulf, a cost that filters into everything shipped through Hormuz regardless of whether the country of origin or destination is a combatant, in the same way strikes on Kuwaiti power and desalination plants have raised the cost of daily life for a population not fighting the war.