Insurance companies’ stocks are already falling in anticipation of the costs of Hurricane Harvey, which experts warn may be in the tens of billions of dollars.
Allstate, Progressive and other insurance companies saw their stocks fall Monday as the remnants of the hurricane roared across Texas. Allstate, which has one of the highest market shares of the Texas residential and commercial market, saw its stock slide 1.3%. Shares of
Travelers dropped 3% at the start of trading Monday, while Hartford Financial Services Group saw a 2.16% drop. Progressive was down 2.5%, while Axis Capital saw a 1.8% drop.
Parts of the Houston area had received more than two feet of rain as of Monday morning, with another one to two feet expected by Friday, according to the National Weather Service. There are about 2.3 million residential and commercial properties in the Houston area that aren’t covered by mandatory flood insurance requirements, according to a report by The Street – and more than half of them are at moderate or high risk of flooding.
“These rains are currently producing catastrophic and life-threatening flooding over large portions of southeastern Texas,” the National Hurricane Center said.
That flooding is going to be a gut-punch to the insurance industry, according to analysts at JPMorgan. The top Wall Street firm told its clients Monday that the eventual insured losses from Harvey could be just under a quarter of the insurance industry’s earnings – as much as $10 billion to $20 billion, according to
CNBC.
“Harvey appears to be more of a flood event and we think the loss estimates are misunderstood,” JPMorgan analyst Sarah DeWitt wrote in a client note. “While flooding is not covered under homeowner’s insurance (it is sold by the government), it is covered under commercial insurance and could result in meaningful losses for the commercial reinsurers and insurers.”
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