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The International Group of P&I Clubs finalized its reinsurance arrangements for the 2026/27 policy year, effective from noon on 20 February 2026. Four of the five vessel categories got a rate reduction. One did not. Fully cellular container ships went up 15 percent, to $1.0237 per gross ton. Persistent oil tankers fell 8 percent, dry cargo fell 5 percent, passenger vessels fell 8.5 percent, and clean tankers were held flat. For a container operator, that is a cost increase ar

In October 2006, the capesize bulk carrier Ocean Victory was discharging iron ore at Kashima in Japan when weather deteriorated. A long swell combined with a northwesterly gale reaching Force 9 on the Beaufort scale. The master decided to leave the berth, lost control of the vessel in the Kashima fairway, and she was driven onto the breakwater and became a total loss. The vessel's hull insurers paid, took an assignment of the owners' and demise charterer's rights, and brought

A hoist motor on a ship-to-shore crane burns out. A compressor in a refrigerated warehouse seizes on a Friday night. A transformer feeding a bulk conveyor system arcs and fails. In each case the equipment is destroyed, the operation stops, and the commercial property policy does not respond. Not because of a limit, a deductible, or a coverage dispute, but because the property form excludes the cause of loss by design. Equipment breakdown coverage fills that gap. It is inexpen

Six months into the conflict, the marine insurance market has a number. David Osler, law and marine insurance editor at Lloyd's List, puts war risk claims arising from the fighting at roughly $2 billion across more than 70 filings. On his assessment it is exceeded, over the past decade, only by the payouts arising from the containership that brought down the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore in 2024. The International Maritime Organization has recorded more than 72 attack

Most maritime companies in the United States are privately held. Family towing operations, regional barge lines, terminal companies, shipyards, forwarders, and single-vessel owners. No public shareholders, no securities filings, and frequently no formal board beyond the people who own the business. The common assumption in that setting is that directors and officers liability insurance is something public companies buy to satisfy investors. It is not. Private company leadersh

For a terminal operator, warehouse, or forwarder, revenue can stop overnight while costs carry on. Rent, equipment leases, payroll, and financing do not pause because a fire closed your facility or a windstorm took the roof off. Business interruption coverage exists to bridge exactly that gap, and for an operation with high fixed costs it is frequently the difference between a difficult year and a closed business. It is also the coverage most often bought at the base level an

Somewhere in your hull policy there is a figure. It was probably set when the vessel was acquired, adjusted once or twice since, and has not been examined closely in years. That number is not an administrative detail. It determines what you are paid if the vessel is lost, whether a casualty counts as a total loss at all, whether you are forced to repair a boat that is not worth repairing, and how much cover you can lawfully buy elsewhere. It is one of the few genuinely strate

Most operators treat renewal as a price negotiation. The broker goes to market, quotes come back, and the conversation is about which number is lowest and whether last year's terms can be held. That framing misses where the leverage sits. By the time quotes are being compared, the underwriter has already formed a view of the risk, and that view was built from the loss runs, the survey report, and a set of judgments about how the operation is run. For a small fleet, those judg

For five months the Hormuz crisis has been a tanker story. Crude carriers hit, product tankers rerouted, VLCCs priced out of transits they had made routinely for decades. LNG featured in the coverage mostly as a supply statistic, a fifth of global flows sitting behind a closed strait. That changed over the last week of July. Two vessels from the same fleet were struck in two different seas in four days, one of them left without propulsion in the middle of the Strait of Hormuz

For five months, the working assumption across the industry has been that the Strait of Hormuz crisis, however severe, was a single-chokepoint problem with a single-chokepoint solution. Cargo could move west. Saudi crude could reach the Red Sea overland and load at Yanbu. The Cape route was expensive and slow but it existed. Every contingency plan drafted since February rested on the premise that one door was closed and another remained open. As of last Monday, that premise n

The $500 per package liability limit under the US Carriage of Goods by Sea Act is one of the most litigated provisions in American maritime law. It is also one of the most consequential for anyone with cargo moving to or from the United States, because when a carrier invokes it successfully, the gap between what cargo is actually worth and what the carrier owes can be enormous. A container of electronics worth $2 million becomes a $500 claim if the carrier can establish that

Every year, Allianz Commercial publishes its Safety and Shipping Review, a data-driven analysis of global shipping loss trends, incident causes, and emerging risk themes drawn from claim data, industry reporting, and their own underwriting experience. This year's edition landed at a moment when the industry is navigating a degree of geopolitical disruption not seen in decades, and the report reflects that context directly. What it also reflects, however, is a more complex and

If you have been buying insurance for any length of time, whether for a vessel, a cargo program, or a commercial operation, you've noticed that premiums do not move in a straight line. Some years the market feels competitive, underwriters are flexible, and capacity seems abundant. Other years the same coverage costs significantly more, terms tighten, and underwriters who were previously eager for your business become selective or absent entirely. This is not arbitrary. It is