Insurance stocks worldwide have fallen in response to a tsunami and earthquake in Japan measuring 8.9 on the Richter scale.<\/p>\n
Shares in large insurers such as Munich Re fell in anticipation of big payouts to cover the cost of the disaster.<\/p>\n
Economists said the economic impact could be “considerable”, although it was too early to make any judgements.<\/p>\n
Asian stock markets also fell after the quake struck only minutes before the 0645 GMT close of trading in Tokyo.<\/p>\n
The Nikkei ended the day down 1.7%, and Nikkei futures fell 3% in after-hours trading in Singapore. Markets in the UK, France and Germany were also down slightly.<\/p>\n
But insurers were the biggest early losers.<\/p>\n
In Frankfurt, insurers Munich Re fell by 5.2%, while Allianz fell by 2.5%. Swiss Re and Hannover Re were also down by more than 4%.<\/p>\n
In London, insurers Admiral, RSA and Prudential were down by 2.4%, 1.9%, and 1.7% respectively.<\/p>\n
Munich Re has already said it would have to pay out about $1bn because of the Christchurch earthquake in New Zealand on 22 February.<\/p>\n
The Tokyo market had already been suffering amid the turmoil in the Middle East before it closed at its lowest level in five weeks.<\/p>\n
Across Asia other markets also fell.<\/p>\n
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng dropped some 1.8% following the earthquake, and ended the day down 1.6%. The Shanghai composite fell by 0.8%.<\/p>\n
By early afternoon, the major European markets were down only slightly – by less than 1%.<\/p>\n
Analysts suggested that shares in Japan were likely to be hit in the near-term, due largely to the uncertainties surrounding the economic impact of the quake.<\/p>\n
Daiwa Capital Markets, who said it was too early to make any predictions, pointed out that the Nikkei had fallen by 25% in the six months after the Kobe earthquake in 1995, when other markets were rising.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Insurance stocks worldwide have fallen in response to a tsunami and earthquake in Japan measuring 8.9 on the Richter scale.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-insurance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=592"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}