Catastrophe bond and related ILS issuance has set second-quarter records, according to insurance news and insights platform Artemis.bm.

Their most recent Catastrophe Bond & Insurance Linked Securities Market Report said that for the first time, cat and insurance-linked securities issuance has exceeded $7 billion in a single quarter, increasing year-on-year by almost $2 billion, and reaching $3.8 billion higher than this year’s first quarter.

It pushes the issuance for the first half of the year to a new record at more than $10.3 billion, the largest half-year yet.

Brad Adderley, Bermuda managing partner of Appleby, said the firm had "probably done more cat bonds than we’ve done for a long time — it’s constant.“

The report outlined that while most of the deals this quarter came from the usual sponsors, there were also many new entrants to the market, including Conduit Re, Spinnaker Insurance Company, Korean Re and the New Zealand Earthquake Commission.

There was a record number of catastrophe bonds featured in the second quarter, 36, beating 2017’s record of 28.

Mr Adderley was sceptical of industry talk of rate softening in the reinsurance market.

He told Artemis: “We’ve got climate anomalies, people are continuing to pull out and we don’t really know how much capital has been raised, and yet, for some reason, people are saying there’s rate softening, which I just don’t understand.”

He further stated that he did not think that pricing was yet high enough.

“Over the last 20 years, how much inflation has there been? And then, how much have people lost in these cat-prone areas over the same time frame?

“So, how much do you actually have to raise rates by to cover all of the money you’ve lost over, say, just the last eight years? It’s a lot.”

He said: “Currently, investors don’t believe in the market. That’s why they haven’t been flooding into the market to take into this better pricing and better terms.”

He further pointed out: “And, with more climate change and inflation, it’s clear that investors either no longer like the risk, fear it, or they just can’t price it because of what’s going on in the world.”