Per https://www.reuters.com/article/us-berkshire-buffett-insuran..., they are planning for handling a potential $400 billion catastrophe.
Hurricane Katrina (2005) was up at 160 Billion and Harvey (2017) hit 125 billion. So 400 Billion is just at the upper end of the expected range.
wouldn't actually giving out the $11mi to the consumer, or picking 10 consumers, create more brand awareness than promising $1bi that nobody can get?
Insurance policies require you to pay a certain amount guaranteed, then pay back a much larger amount if something unlikely happens. So Pepsi had to pay $10 million. If the right thing happened during the game then Berkshire Hathaway would have paid a billion, and some lucky consumer would have walked away a newly minted billionaire.
Berkshire's General Re does reinsurance, not re-"reinsurance". Is there a recursive step -- Could General Re face a claim that it needs to leans on the rest of Berkshire to pay?
The article says its insurance companies face a 2 percent chance of being "$12 billion" insolvent, which Berkshire could cover from non-insurance profits. But would that still be true if the claims came in, or would the non-insurance companies also have correlated down years? I suppose Berkshire Hathaway is big enough that if it came down to it, it could liquidate equity ($500B minus devaluation due to whatever catastrophe) to make good on claims.
I work for an insurer and got talking with one of our pricing guys who told me about a case where one of the big multinationals had one division which was way under it’s predicted claims volume for the year, and another that was over. To rebalance the risk the US division ended up insuring the EU division.
Another story that night was about a reinsurer that through several departments taking on different risks ended up on the hook for a dockyard which caught fire catastrophically. And all the goods in that dockyard. And the boat which started the fire.
That evening led to my drunken catchphrase: “fucking insurance”, said ever more enthusiastically.
The only alternative to the "government backstop" is that insurers will refuse to write policies or will exclude earthquake risk (in which case the government may need to set up it's own scheme, e.g. in CEA insurance in California).