David Osler, marine insurance editor at Lloyd's List, estimated cumulative war-risk claims across the conflict at about $2bn as of 3 September1. War-risk cover is the separate policy a shipowner buys against war, mines, seizure and hostile attack, priced as a percentage of a vessel's insured value for each voyage into a listed area.
Underwriters replace paid claims out of future premiums, so a loss run of this size is repriced into every voyage through the listed waters, including the ships nobody has touched. Protection and indemnity clubs cancelled Gulf war-risk cover in August and then repurchased it on new terms, which is the market doing the same arithmetic in advance. A vessel off Yemen was written off as a constructive total loss in the same week.
The figure comes from one editor at one publication and covers the whole conflict rather than any single week, so it is an estimate of an aggregate rather than a tally of settled claims. Nobody publishes a running total of Gulf war-risk payouts, which is why an informed estimate is the best available number and why the next one is worth comparing against this one.
