How Shipping Insurance Really Works During a War

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Hello and welcome to another episode of the OddLots podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wiesenthal. Joe, you know, I'm slightly obsessed with insurance. Maybe obsessed isn't the right word, but fascinated, appreciative of insurers because I think there's a tendency to think of them as sort of limiting factors in the world. So, you know, if you can't get insurance in California, you can't build a house. But I also think of them as enablers of certain behaviors, right? I think that's a really good way to put it. People do a lot of things that they wouldn't otherwise do. Were they not able to get insurance on it? So, yes, it does cut in both directions. So we should appreciate the existence of the existence of insurance. All right, well now you know what my daughter actually your daughter has insurance. She asked me to explain insurance the other day, which I was like, you know, and then suddenly I was like, I have to explain. Wait, first of all, tell the listeners how old your daughter is. Just 10. I can't remember the context exactly what it was. Maybe something about fire insurance, etc. But I think I was actually pretty proud of myself. I was basically like, there are these risks that happen where like save your house burns down, you could like ruin you financially, but it doesn't make sense to like save all that money in cash and always have that much savings available to be able to rebuild your house. And therefore the way you solve it is by paying a small amount. I was like pretty like happy. I think she got it. I'm glad she's planning for home ownership at an early age. Okay, well now is a really good time to think and appreciate insurance because as you know, we are recording this on April 8th. I feel like, do I need to say the hour? Maybe I do 1206pm on April 8th. It is not entirely clear at the moment what is going on in the straight of four moves. We don't know if ships are being allowed to pass or not, but we do know since the earliest days of this entire conflict happening that one of the issues that's come up is war insurance and maritime insurance in general. Yeah, and we sort of like touched on it in our very first episode that related to the war, but of course one major reason why ships haven't been moving through is the direct threat of being attacked and sinking. But then another element is the entire insurance element. And then beyond that, like that adds cost to everything and it's not, you know, how do you price war insurance? I have no idea. So I have many more questions on this topic. Yeah, the whole ecosystem of maritime insurance in general, you hear these things thrown around like whole loss protection and liability protection and there's the reinsurers and then there's the normal insurance and then there are insurance clubs, right? They're all these things. I want to be part of an insurance, see you belong to the Soho Club, me, I belong to an insurance club. Like think about that. You kind of have the club jacket thing going on at the moment. Okay, well, we do in fact have the perfect guest to talk about all of this. We're going to be speaking with Dorothea Iwanu. She is the chief executive officer of the managers of the American P&I club. So you can ask her if you can join. As well. I need like one, I need one member to endorse me and another one. That's how it works All right. Well, the second member who could potentially endorse you is Steve Ogallukian. He is the reinsurance director at the American P&I club. So truly the perfect guest. Thank you so much for coming on all thoughts. Thank you for having us. Thank you. Why don't you go ahead and tell Joe what is an insurance club and can he be part of them? Okay, great. First of all, I love that you talked about insurance, especially from our perspective, clubs, we're enablers. So what are clubs? Clubs in our context, the P&I club, which means protection and indemnity is a collective. It's a non not-for-profit accessible mutual association. It's not a commercial insurer and it basically historically is a club that brought together ship owners in the industry that we're trying to fill a gap. So they came from a need for society and really what clubs do is while they insure the owner, they are protecting society because they are ensuring the owner for what you referred to before as liabilities. So that would be like losses or damages that they cause to other people, not to themselves. So the clubs never pay own damages. We will not pay damage that occurs to the vessel in an accident or if they have economic loss, their own economic loss. So what P&I clubs do is they step in and they protect the owner and defend the claims, but they ultimately pay whatever is the fare compensation or whatever is adjudicated for passengers that perhaps get hurt on the ship due to negligence of the ship, claims from a crew that might get hurt in an accident. Liabilities related to collision. So if the ship hits another ship and they cause damage or personal injury to people or crew on the other ship, they'll pay that. Oil pollution, environmental damage, you know, so cleanup related to that. So basically the way we like to think about P&I and you really should think about it like this, it's the safety net and it is the only way that a ship can trade. So for example, let's look at what you do with your car, right? You're not allowed on the road if you don't have liability insurance, right? You don't have to have own damages insurance, right? But you do need to have liability because we need to know that all the cars on the road have financial security behind them that if something happens and somebody else gets hurt, there's a compensation that's going to come from somebody that's responsible. So that's the concept, let's say, of a P&I club. And you mentioned that it's structured as a non-profit. So I take it that you're doing this just out of the goodness of your heart. No, that's a joke. But talk to us about like, so then- What's the concept behind it? Well, so like why is it that and then who is bearing the risk for which they're taking a profit? Right. Okay, so let's go a little bit to the history of it so you can understand it. So basically if you go back in time, let's say up until the 1800s, up to a certain point, there was no liability for most of your marine liability insurers. As things started to change and they started to impose strict liabilities, regulatory changes started to happen in various countries, passenger liabilities started to increase, and also the liability started to get a lot more volatile. Your regular commercial insurers did not want to touch it. They couldn't price it. They didn't want to deal with it. And also your classic policy would have a limit of the value of the ship. And a lot of times liabilities would exceed that. So what happened was the ship owners came together to say, well, we can't allow, like you said before, you know, number one, you can't put all of this money aside until the time is needed. And you also can't risk becoming financially destitute, right? In the instance that you have a catastrophe. So the ship owners came together and said, let's pool our risks. So the not-for-profit element is this. So the concept goes to, in principle, we each put a certain amount of money into a pool. It's based, let's say, on factors that they agree, club members. They have to be ship owners, by the way. So if you do have an ocean going vessel, we could consider making you a member. So there's a formula or an underwriting formula where everybody pays a certain rate per ton, okay? And then dating back to the beginning of time when they started this, if all of the losses were less than the amount that they had put aside into the pool, then they could either have it returned or they could save it for the next year and pay less the next year. And each year there would be a reconciliation. But if the losses were more, they each had to put in, you know, pro rata based on their tonnage and based on the formula. So that's the concept of not profit. Now, of course, back then regulation wasn't the way it is today. So now you're not allowed to just keep enough to pay your losses. So now there's regulatory requirements. So now the not-for-profit has kind of increased to you need to be healthy not-for-profit. So you have to meet certain solvency ratios under regulation. So that's the concept. I don't know if you wanted to add anything on that. No, but ultimately it's providing at-cost insurance for the members of the club. So like you said, you want to join the club. If the four of us have vessels and we want to form our own P&I club, you could theoretically do that, pull our money together, as Dorothea said, and say, hopefully it's enough to meet the claims for the year. If not, we're fine putting in more. But it's better than going through commercial underwriter who's going to charge double that because they need to make a profit and they don't want to take a loss. So it's kind of like self-insurance. So it's kind of like self-insurance. Like self-insurance might think of something that exists at the firm level and this is self-insurance kind of at the industry level. Right, exactly. So one of the things that comes up immediately if you type in American P&I Club into Google is it says it's the only American insurance club. There are a bunch apparently in London and actually I would like to talk about how London became like a big insurance capital in general. But why is there only one American insurance club? Okay, well then we'd have to go back and talk about how the American club was born, right? So yeah, so historically the origins of organized insurance really are into the financial center of the London market actually started, I think, with Rami Steve, with some brokers in a coffee shop in London that started to decide, well, we actually, it's the same concept of how the club's developed but at the more fundamental level of the basic, well, we don't want to risk losing the cargo or the ship en route. So underwriters were kind of born through that process. But the American club actually was born much later. So the American operators historically were ensuring with the London clubs. And then 1916, the Americans were not in World War I yet, right? The UK was. So the UK at that time passed what was called the UK Trading with the Enemy Act and which basically says, you know, if you are, you know, trading with my enemy, then you're my enemy. And at that time the United States was not in certain American operators were still involved in certain types of trades. And the UK then, this act prohibited a lot of American operators from continuing to have their insurance with the UK clubs at that time. So back then, I think was the largest US broker, Johnson and Higgins, I think at that time, came together with shipowners, industry lawyers and lobbyists and legislators and realized that they were going to have to create something in the United States. And I think that this, it's very interesting how it's kind of very timely of what's going on in the United States right now, because we're seeing that, you know, in terms of our peers, in terms of other countries, even our allies or even non-allies, we've kind of fallen behind on the maritime side, right? So in the industry, like we used to be the number one maritime nation in the world. And now we're definitely not. And so they came together and they surveyed the American operators to see, would you be interested and would you join an American P&I club that would fundamentally work the way the London clubs would already work? And they got a lot of favorable response. And then within the year, they had enabling legislation in New York state, which created the structure because it didn't exist before that and needed to have a regulatory structure. And on February 20th, February 14, sorry, Valentine's Day, 1917, the American club was born. And since then, it's not an easy thing to put together a club, you know, because you start from scratch really. And so since then, we have been the only club and we've brought, we've taken the United States through two World Wars since then, but also been a part of this whole ebb and flow of the American maritime industry. Yeah. And I was gonna say, that doesn't mean that our members are only American. No. So historically, yeah. So explain why that is. It's just the name now is the American club. Okay. And then you have the Swedish club, you have the London club, you have the Japan club. But there are members who are global, global, so all over the world. Right. So I would say maybe 30 years ago, we were probably 80%, maybe even more. Yeah. In the US based membership, in the 90s, we went more of a globalization effort in the 90s. And how do ship owners decide which club to be a member of? A lot of it's service oriented. Again, who you know, right? You have a friend who owns a ship and he's like, I'm with the American club, I'm with this club. Have a great experience with them, close with the claim handlers, underwriters. If I need something, they pick up the phone, I can talk to them, I'll make the introduction. So it could be as simple as that. Or some people just go on Google and say, I need to join, I need P and I insurance, where could I go? And maybe if they're American, they see American P and I. Is there like a maritime insurance comparison site where you get all the different rates or something like that? Yeah. But there is an international group of P and I clubs. I don't know, Steve, if you want to talk about that, how that works. So there's collectively now there's 12 international group clubs known as the international group of P and I clubs. Collectively, we ensure 90% of ocean going tonnage. So being a member of one of those clubs, it effectively the same way that clubs work together, they pool risks, the group works together in the same way. So being a member of the international group, it allows you and there's a few core functions of the IG. As the re-insurance director, selfishly, I'll say the most important is the re-insurance purchasing power that the group clubs have. So collectively, the 12 clubs come together every year and they purchase policies. I think it's the largest re-insurance policy in the world. There's roughly 85 separate re-insurers on this, various points of the world. And we ensure risks up to what we provide cover for about $8 billion per incident, but we buy re-insurance collectively with the other clubs up to $3 billion. So it's fairly unique because they are competitors of ours, but together we realize the best thing for an individual ship owner is to have this group purchasing power and allows us to buy high levels of re-insurance at pretty inexpensive costs. It's so interesting because I guess like insurance per se is all about pooling. So you're just like layers of layers of pool. Yes, spreading the risk. So I certainly want to get more soon to the role of this P&I insurance within the context of the war right now. But one quick question I have, you mentioned that entities contribute based on their tonnage. And when you use the driving insurance analogy to talk about liability, you know, there are various factors that go into how old are you? Have you taken defensive driving? How many tickets you've gotten, etc. Why is tonnage, which is not a metric that would suggest risk to others in my mind, an important proxy here? No, it's not a risk factor. It is how we multiply. The rate is per ton. But the rate per ton comes from all of those risk factors. I don't know if Steve, you want to get it. Oh, I see what you're saying. So one might be $1 a ton. Somebody else paid $2 a ton. Somebody made $5 a ton. Oh, I see. So it's not that there's like a fixed price. No. No. Okay, so talk about that pricing. Yeah, I mean, of, got it. That's good. Not all tonnage is quitted. Yeah, exactly. So if you have a small barge, for instance, that doesn't have any crew, it's just carrying coal up and down a river versus a large cruise ship. We have multiple crew members and passengers on there. That one ton, if you will, on each vessel is not the same. So they're going to get priced differently per ton. They would get priced differently per ton. Okay, so it's not really about the tonnage. It's not about, it's just a measuring tool. I see. That makes a lot of sense. But like, let's say you have the same sector, you have the same type of ship, a lot of the same factors, the smaller ship's going to pay less than the larger ship simply because of the tonnage, let's say. So they might both be charged at $5 a ton, for example, but because also that is also a factor in assessing limitation of liability. Do the clubs play a role in like ensuring training of the crew and things like that that would be proxies for safety and so forth? Well, this is going to be my question because one of the other reasons we appreciate insurers here is because like there are arbiters of behavior, right? And especially at a time when a lot of governments seem to be, you know, stepping back from certain markets, it's often like the private insurers who are saying like, this is what you need to do in order to get insurance. What are the requirements for ship owners in order to be eligible for club membership? Great, great. That's a great question. So there are a lot of requirements. And yes, loss prevention is a big thing that also differentiates us from commercial underage. We go to the website, you'll see a whole section on loss prevention. So we do look at the quality of the operation. We do look at the experience of the people that are running the management. There are warranties as well. So number one, you have to be of a technical level in terms of quality. So that we're going to get a little bit complicated here. But okay, so ships are also subject to other requirements independent of the club. And that's subject to the requirements of their classification society. So the classification society are like the surveyors, the technical arbiters, let's say that comments and make sure that the ship is of certain quality technically. So you have to be in, we call it in class is what we call it. That's definitely a requirement. And then of course, we also require that you are conducting only legal trade. So that is another aspect of that. I will hand it over to Steve to add other aspects on the underwriting side. The main one, I mean, we do management audits as well, obviously. So we bring because sometimes it's a startup, right, which is tough because there's no history there to see where they've been. Ideally, as an underwriter, you're looking at a client who's been with another club and is looking to switch. So they come over, you see a loss record, you have a pattern, you know where they're operating, what they're doing. When it's a startup, it's a bit more difficult than that, where we'll go out. And again, sometimes it could just be proactively, we haven't met this member, let's see them in person, what they're up to get on their ships. Other times, we do a condition survey is yeah, from that perspective, quite often we would do a condition survey. So we would do a, in that case, like a pre entry condition survey, where if the vessel is older than 10 years of age, we'll say we need to see it. Even though it's in class, we just want to make sure from a PNI perspective, our requirements and that there's certain things that check all the boxes for it to come into the club. What actually constitutes risky behavior on the part of a ship? Because again, if we go to the driving analogy, like, okay, speeding is bad, that would be risky, driving drunk would be very bad. Yeah. What's like the equivalent? 16 years of ship. Well, the other thing that we look at is the history and the claims record, right? So we would see the incidents and the types of incidents. So if we see patterns or trends, a lot of times, it has to do with their trading. So certain trades might be a little bit riskier than others. And that just comes from our actuarial analysis. So each club also takes their portfolios and analyzes the trends on the claims, and you'll determine the levels of risk and your risk appetite with that. So like, for example, our experience has shown us that container ships have certain types of risks that might not be the same as others. So while some people might look at a container ship and say, okay, well, they do liner business, so they're quite organized, right? They're quite sophisticated. What's liner business? So going from one port to another often, right? So that means that they're very familiar with the two ports, the people are very familiar, the approach of management is quite sophisticated. And then you might look at it from a risk perspective and say, okay, how much are each of the containers worth in case there's an accident, they fall, but you have to think bigger than that. So for example, if there's a casualty on a container ship, and it's a total loss in any seaway in any ocean in the world, the catastrophe risk is much different than let's say, a balker that might sink or a tanker, because those individual containers, for example, will start to pop up and float to all different places on all different coasts, wherever, whatever is adjacent to the sea that it has sunk that it sank in, in which case, though, part of the liability includes cleaning those all up. And those types of containers are considered hazardous waste. So there's a special disposal process that has to go can be quite expensive. It can also cause danger to navigation in seaway. So you see what it means? It really, you look at the type of ship that you're looking at, and you look at the type of claims that it might, that can possibly arise. But we look mainly, Steve, I would say, at, we look at industry, but we look mainly, each club will look at their own experience and decide that, you know, what they classify as risky behavior. We look, we analyze claims, and we learn from the claims to decide what we're willing to tolerate, and what we're not willing to tolerate, or what we're willing to tolerate, but we're going to charge a lot more, for example, because the risk is higher. I don't know if you wanted to add something. No, I was going to say a lot of it too is human error. So you could do all these actuarial studies and you still have a mistake. To say that this vessel operating in this region is likely to have X amount of claims per year, but you can't account for crew member not sleeping or falling asleep at the wheel, basically, and causing an accident, which has happened. So a lot of its human error are not being trained properly, small things. I mean, as P&I ensures, people look at us and think large oil spills, wreck removals, the big headline claims, but our average claim is about $20,000 or $30,000 per claim. So it could be a small crew claim, a cargo claim. So these are the things that add up and determine how a P&I club is operating, not so much the one off big incident. Yeah. And sorry, I just wanted to add one more thing going back to the original question that you posed in terms of what was our role in terms of training, let's say, or loss prevention. So while we are not the primary people or group that's responsible for training crews, because there's crew managers, the operators themselves have to do that, the training that they get in the schools that they go to and stuff are really, what we do though is based on our analysis of our claims though, we identify gaps, we identify issues, we identify trends, and then we do actually have programs that enhance training. So from whatever they're doing, we will add things. So you'll look on our website and you'll see that we have regulatory training that the owner can use to actually track the training of their crews, that make sure that they know certain minimum standards of the regulatory knowledge. Let's say, are they familiar with how to handle like the collision regulations, for example, and other types of modern regulation for navigating its day. We've also done vlogs, we've done interviews, we do seminars, and then we also do like a good catch series. So you'll see that we take our cases and we analyze near misses, and then we identify what our owners and their crews and their people are sure can do better in order to prevent that in the future. Today's show is brought to you by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors listening, let's talk bonds for a minute. Capturing value in fixed income is not easy. 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So, I have a personal question, which is, this is kind of odd-lots lore, but I'll repeat it for people that don't know the story. But many years ago, I guess four years ago or so, it feels longer, doesn't it? Okay, four years ago, my furniture got stuck on a container ship called the Ever Forward that ran aground in the Chesapeake Bay. And I think an investigation found that the pilot had been using his phone or something, which is kind of crazy to think about. I didn't see any insurance payout from that. I know my property wasn't like actually damaged, but it was kind of annoying not having a couch for a couple months or however long it was. If something like that happens, what is the actual distribution of the insurance payout? So, who does it actually flow to ultimately? Does it eventually reach the customer who's shipping stuff on these ships? There's not a straightforward answer. There's a lot of dependencies that go along with that, and it has to do with the contract that you have, right? And the various insurances that are placed. Now, to a certain extent, there has to be a certain limit on what could be considered too remote, for example. And under certain regimes, you would probably have to have physical damage in order to be able to claim the economic loss related to that. That is probably the reason why a lot of times when you ship things, they ask, do you want insurance so you can ensure yourself? Because there's no guarantee that ultimately that will get up to the P&I Club, for example, because it just flows into contractual liabilities under that. But the shipper would have cargo insurance as a whole to get from point A to point B? And obviously, part of that is it's going to be on a vessel most likely. So, if the ship owner is negligent and they're found liable for that loss, so like you said, he was on the phone, vessel grounded, then the cargo underwriter would go after the owner, which ultimately gets covered by the P&I Clubs. By the way, I'm on your website and you guys have some great posters, these safety posters that people should go check out. Do they say don't be on your phone? Yeah, there's one. Something as simple as that. Yeah, there's one that's like, I kind of want to get one of these framed like from my house, they're really cool looking. I'll blow it up. But like, does it feed your focus when shut off personal cell phones? I see you guys, you know, it's like safety stuff. And this will go well to all our members. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. But also, listeners should just go and download these because they're pretty cool looking. Yeah, you know, we also, sorry, just so you said that, something that could also apply to people not in the maritime industry. We have a whole series related also to like sexual harassment that creates awareness for you to understand what that means. That simple things that even based on certain cultural or even habitual type of behaviors that can be considered sexual harassment creates awareness for it. It's a really fantastic series. Yeah, there's a lot of good resources here. All right, let's talk about like the context of this conversation within the war in Iran. And the reason, I mean, the issue to my mind is like, okay, so are you affected by it? Because when I think about the situation, I'm by and large not thinking about risks that ships are going to pose to others in the context of war, as opposed to risks to the ship. So like, talk to us about like the degree to which for your PNI is a factor or the Iran war is a factor in the world of PNI insurance. Well, I'm going to give you the big picture and then Steve will analyze it, we'll break it down. So traditionally, war has its own special sector of war underwriters, war insurance. The PNI standard policy excludes liabilities that arise out of war acts. However, there is an excess level of cover that is offered by the PNI club simply because the standard policies are limited by the value of the vessel. I'm going to hand it over to Steve. We've been talking about PNI and liability. Yeah, yeah. But if you're a shipowner, you so you come to us for your PNI insurance, you go to a hull and machine underwriter for hull and machinery for the vessel's value what's on the ship. Right. So you have two separate towers of insurance. Yeah. So we cover the liability, they cover the hull. But because we exclude war risks, it's traditionally offered, there's a few places they could go. Traditionally, the hull underwriter will give you war risk cover for PNI and hull up to the value of the ship. Okay. So if you have a $10 million ship, you're insured so the ship sinks, it's a total loss, you're covered for $10 million underwriter, writes you a check. There's a pollution element, they'll cover $10 million of that loss as well. So that's traditionally PNI, but because we excluded the hull war underwriters. It just seems to be clear. If a ship is sunk in the war, then there could also be a liability on the part of the owner for the pollution caused by their own ship having been sunk. Potentially. Potentially. There's a lot of nuances there. There's a lot of nuances to that too. It has to do with also convention, there's certain international conventions that exclude if it's subject to war, but then there's certain national legislations that carve that out. So it depends on where it might happen. So just to be clear though, when you talk about like, you said there's a war exception or you don't cover war risk. We don't cover it. On the primary level. But why would PNI ever include war risk? Because the question is war to my mind does not... What if a crew member dies? That's live. So that is okay. I see. I see. Okay. So this is really important. So the crew member's death in a war would be... Or a crew member's death would be PNI. Yes. Right. But you don't in a war that you do not cover. Unless. Got it. Right. And on top of it, so we mentioned pollution. We mentioned crew. Rec removal would be one. So, you know, vessels going through the straight. There's mines. If it were to sink and it's a wreck and it's in a shipping channel. Yeah. Eventually. And let's say the conflict ends. Well, now you have a wreck there that needs to be moved. So PNI clubs would have to step in and remove that wreck, which will cost a lot more than the value of the vessel. So what the PNI clubs do offer is what Dorothy mentioned, excess insurance. So excess of the hull's value, knowing that a wreck or pollution event could likely not crew, but a larger loss could breach that 10 million or whatever the value is. But in this example, 10 million, you breach that threshold. The PNI clubs as part of our collective reinsurance buying, we buy reinsurance for war PNI. And every ship owner who's entered an NEIG club every year pays a small amount. It's not a lot, but they pay a small amount for that coverage. So we fill that gap. So just to be clear, just to spell this out, in a war, you do not provide war insurance, the vessel would go to some other commercial carrier. And they would have that in place. And they would have that. But the PNI club does offer this excess based on the reinsurance purchasing power. Protects the sign. Beyond what the commercial carrier may offer. Okay, this is great. And effectively, we're buying it on their behalf. Yeah, got it. So I have what might be a dumb question. But why are all these different risks so bifurcated between different players? Why is there a separate whole protection provider, a war risk provider? If I'm buying home insurance for the most part, I just go to an insurer. And it's like, okay, we're going to cover your roof damage as well as whatever else might happen. I don't have to go to three different insurers for the most part. Yeah, I think it comes out of exclusions. So originally, the whole underwriters didn't want to offer coverage for liabilities, because like Dorothea said, they didn't know how to price it. It wasn't their forte. So there was a gap in cover. Right. Yeah. I see. So PNI clubs were born out of that. So now you have a club. And what do you want? You want some kind, you want to be able to project what your claims will be in a given year. So the club members are ensuring themselves or each other for what I'll call predictable risks, right? Going from Port A to Port B with a certain cargo, accidents happen. But if something is a little more specialized, so if you have a vessel operator who's involved in drilling and production operations, that would be excluded as well, because that's not a mutual pullable risk. Because that might be a one off where you may be doing that with your vessel, but the three of us may be saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, we don't want to cover that. That's a complete different risk. So war falls into that. Yeah, that makes sense. It's hard to predict. So the PNI underwriters excluded war traditionally and now created, there's war clubs or all would step in and offer limited war cover. Yeah. I mean, it's important to keep in mind too that war risk is not actually stable, right? It's not like the rest of the risks. It's really just subject to geopolitics and national relations between countries. And it's really just, it's just based on that, whereas most other types of insurance is actually stable. Not always predictable, but actually you can analyze it. You can't really do that for war. And then one thing I think is important to note, and this has been a topic of discussion, I think, on the war side, is that during the year in peacetime, it's very cheap. Yeah. Okay. It's very cheap. And so I know that there was a lot of talk about the cancellations and stuff like that. It's really, they have to do that because they're not underwriting based on the ship's transiting war areas. They're underwriting based on trading in peaceful areas. So once an area then becomes subject to a war act, they do have to be able to re-rate that. And so even though they gave a notice of cancellation, these are the headlines we saw at the beginning of the conflict saying that war risk insurance has been pulled right at the start of a war, which was very confusing. A lot of people included. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I was getting Instagram Reels sent to me of people trying to explain it and complete misconception. And when you're getting Reels on P&I insurance, you know something big is going on. Yeah. I don't know if you want to explain why the P&I clubs had to give that notice that we gave because everybody said, oh, the P&I clubs are canceling war. We don't cover war, but in certain instances we do. Why don't you explain where we cover it? Yeah. Right. Well, just to kind of back up a bit on what the cancellation means, it's really a cancellation of the rate, not of the cover. So everyone was saying, oh, these vessels are trapped because they don't have insurance. It's not true. And, you know, Lloyd's in London is almost doing this to get back to the US. First of all, all those, not all, but many of the underwriters at Lloyd's are American companies. So it wasn't the UK saying, you know, we're going to get the US back for this. We don't support the war. Pull insurance coverage. The vessels are trapped. That's not the case. Every war policy, even though we're not war experts or war underwriters, the way it works, every war policy has a notice of cancellation clause saying if basically if a war were to break out, like you have here and vessels are now in the Gulf, well, we didn't price for that. We gave you a cheap rate because you're sailing around the world. Now you're in a war zone. The risk changes. So we cancel your policy and meaning we cancel the rate you paid. Give you three day notice. You're covered if something happens. So if you're struck, you're still covered, right? But now after that three days lapses, you have to buy your cover back at a higher rate based on if you're trading there. If you're not trading there, it didn't affect you at all. Yeah. So if you're trading there, yeah, go ahead. So that's what we do. Those were the headlines, the notice of cancellation. So it looks like this is so helpful. Yeah. But why the P&I clubs give a notice? Right. So P&I, so that confused people. Our mutual risks were not so anything that's pulled and has this excess war was not impacted. But we also offer cover to charters. So not just ship owners if you're chartering a vessel. Do we know what a charter is? No. Trace is not. I don't have no idea. A charter, it's kind of like when you lease a car, it's like you're chartering it. So you don't own it. You don't own it. You're paying somebody to use it. Yeah. Okay. So yeah. The owner is liable. Most of time for big oil spills, rec removal, whatever it may be. But a charter could be found liable for some of this. So a charter is risk because it's not pulled with an EIG and there's separate reinsurances for that. That includes war. Right. So that's always been a pass through. So we will include charters P&I war cover. And because we've received a notice of cancellation from our reinsurers, we tell them we have to cancel your war cover in the Persian Gulf, but give us two days and then we're going to come up with a solution, which is what came up. Yeah. We had a solution they could buy it back at a higher rate. Yeah. How much did the premium actually change? It depends on where they were calling, but it was, to give an example, there was like one vessel we saw their war slip, their traditional war before the war broke out. They were paying about $15,000 a year for that. And then when the rates first came out from the underwriters to get the vessel out of the Gulf, it was going to cost about $60,000 just for a seven day period to get it out. And then once the straight closed and there were mines in a straight, there was a separate notice given if you're transiting the straight. So now you have a war, we call it a buyback. It's a reinstatement of the cover. You have your war buyback for the Persian Gulf. You're covered in there, but if you're transiting the straight, there's a new exclusion that may apply with new rating. Sorry, you said mines in the straight. Right. A, are there definitely mines? Because I think there's been some discussion of that. And then B, this kind of gets to the question that Joe mentioned at the intro. I know I talked about insurers as enablers of behavior, but when you're in a war situation, I assume people also don't want to be killed. Exactly. Even if they can get insurance. That's what we wanted to get to. The vessel, they weren't trapped because there was no insurance or because the rates went up. They just don't want to put their crews at risk. You want to put your crew at risk. People should know though too that ultimately the decision to do that type of course is for the master of the vessel to decide. It's not, you can't direct him to do something that he believes will put the crew and the ship at risk. That is rule number one. I do want to comment. This is a core maritime principle. Yes, exactly. The other thing I wanted to mention is that actually I was speaking to one of our colleagues that manages our European subsidiary and he has an experience in Holland on war. I was given to understand that the ships that were trapped on the inside were given different rates than ships that were looking to go in and out. The ships that were trapped, it was taken into account that this is not a voluntary, it's not an initiative to trade in a high risk area that they are trapped. If they want, the rates were significantly lower to come out if you were trapped, then it was for those ships looking to actually transit to do regular trade through the high risk. In those cases when they were looking to trade, the rates were ranging from anywhere from 3 to 10% of the hull value. The ones that were initiating this type of trade whereas compared to the ones on the inside, the average rate I was told was about 0.5. It's a big difference. That is very important to understand and insurance was always available. It's just whether you wanted to do it really ultimately. The operators and our members that we spoke to all made it very clear that the safety of their crew was much more important than everything else. I'm Francine Lacquah, an award-winning journalist and I've got a new podcast. Leaders with Francine Lacquah from Bloomberg Podcasts. I've interviewed everyone from heads of state to fashion icons about the news of the moment, but I've always been curious who are these people as leaders. I don't think there's one right way to be a leader. Make decisions. A poor decision is always better than no decision. Listen to new episodes every other Monday. Follow Leaders with Francine Lacquah wherever you get your podcasts. It makes a lot of sense to me that certain types of insurance that end up in this sort of self-insurance model are the types that are highly stable and predictable. Tracy, do you remember 2014 AOL, it was still a public company. I don't know if anyone remembers this, a little bit of insurance history. The CEO said on its earnings call that the company's profits had taken a hit because one of their employees had a very high complicated pregnancy. It was so big that they actually he noted and then everyone figured it out. I think who it was, and it was a pretty egregious privacy violation, but they were self-insured because it's a large company and over time your health insurance costs are going to be stable from one year to another, but it was just, I guess, such an expensive pregnancy that he mentioned it on the call as having affected earnings that quarter. But it does seem, yeah, but it just really clicked that when you have a type of insurance in which payout distributions are roughly stable on a year-to-year basis, that is the natural time for the sort of nonprofit self-insurance model of some sort. Well, actually though, there is a nuance to that. So because it's not really always stable, it's just spread out enough that there's a resiliency to it. They're able to withstand the volatility. The model is able to withstand the volatility. Since there are multiple clubs that carriers can choose, do clubs risk like sort of snowball effects, carriers defect, and then suddenly you have fewer members and then the risk is like magnified? Is that attention from one club to another? I wouldn't want to be part of a small club. We're a small club. I mean, like a really tiny club where it's like, oh, the two of us were going to insure each other. This is what I'm saying. Yeah, this is what I'm saying. It feels like you need some critical mass. Right, it's well, like I said, the clubs collectively insure 90% of ocean going tonnage. So being a smaller club is still a big club. Yeah, I'm saying there would be a level in which mutual insurance doesn't make any sense. There are rules in place to deal with certain things like that. It's true, you actually don't want, because P&I has a long tail, right? So sometimes you take some claims, they're still open 10 years after and sometimes even longer. So that's why actually the mutual system allows for multi-year openness. I would be part of that. But yes, there are, we do have agreements in place that protect us from things like that. Yeah. And the way the pooling and reinsurance mechanism works, it's all relative to your size. So the clubs collectively pool claims, individual claims between $10 million and $100 million, and then beyond that, they're buying this reinsurance up to $3.5 billion. But what you pay is relative to... There's a formula, which we're not going to go through. It gets complicated, but it's based on your relative size. So if you're a smaller club, right, you're paying less for these large marathon casualties, where larger club is going to take a big hit, even if it's not their claim. So it's all scaled. It's all scaled. And it's quite fair. And the concept actually is that everybody pays their share over time. Yeah. Yeah. Over and it works. What you take out, you need to put back in. And that's at the club level and at the group level, let's say. Yeah. Just going back to the Strait of War moves for a second, there are some ships from certain companies that have been running through, despite everything going on. And the one that springs to mind is DynaCom. And I actually, I sent an email to them asking if I could get their owner on OddLotson. I haven't received a response, perhaps unsurprisingly. But what is enabling them to get through versus other ships? Yeah, I don't think that that's something that we'd be able to really... They're not our members. We're not familiar. We do have another member though that was hit. The other thing I wanted to mention is that despite the fact that the P&I clubs are not the primary insurer on a case of war, we actually do take an active part. So we are involved. We are close to the member because we have a very close relationship with all of our members to begin with. We are most of the time copied on all the correspondence. So we also provide some guidance because besides the P&I side, we also have what's called an FD&D cover and that's freight to margin defense. And so that helps the owners with disputes that may arise, contractual disputes. We don't ensure the claims themselves, but we provide the guidance, the legal guidance. We have a lot of lawyers within the club, but we also support them if we have to hire lawyers outside to defend or to pursue any claims that they may have and that's a legal costs cover. So a lot of the times, even on cases that we are not directly responsible for or not directly not responsible for but covering, we're usually quite involved because like I said, we're protection and indemnity. The protection part of it involves standing next to the member and guiding them. But the intricacies of any particular owner being able to cross the street is not something that we're actually privy to. So yeah, I mean, the only thing I can say is that I know that there are certain factors that are looked at by the Iranians when they are attacking. This is such an interesting conversation. You can go a lot longer. I'm looking at this article about Dinocombe, the owner of the billionaire shipping magnate, Greek buccaneer George Prokopu, that's the name of the firm. I noticed so at the American club, you have office locations in York, London, also in Pyrrhus, in Greece, and then also Shanghai and Hong Kong. And I'm just curious, like, so I guess I had this current moment aside, we all sort of know that Greece specifically is one of the centers of shipping for a long time. But has it moved east over time? Okay, we know that a lot of the ship building has happening in Asia. And we also know that so many of the routes are Asia dominated, etc. Have the financial flows of insurance moved east in the same way the physical flows, have the financial flows of insurance moved towards Asia, I should say specifically, rather than the same. On insurance side? Yeah, on insurance side. Has insurance not from an international perspective? Move towards Asia in the same way that the trade flows have. No, not from an international perspective. China does have its own P&I club. It's not a member of the international group P&I clubs. They do have reinsurance relationships with some of the clubs that are members of the group. It's a very large P&I club, but it generally ensures a Chinese managed and even building and trade is so Asia dominated. The financial element of the insurance has not the insurance. No, it hasn't really not from the international side of things. Not from the international side of things. I think even all the major traders are still ensuring with the UK, Scandinavian and American clubs. I would say, Dave, I don't know if you've seen anything different. I've not seen anything different. If the US starts building ships again, is that great for the American P&I club? Would your membership automatically increase? It wouldn't automatically increase. No, because there's no directive in any country that you need to let your insurance has to be domestic. But it would probably increase our potential to grow if we began to build ships in the United States. Do you see any signs of that actually happening? We've done a number of episodes on how to get people who wanted to happen. People who wanted to happen. Yes. We wanted to happen. We want the American maritime industry generally to become stronger. We think it's a shame how it's developed over time. The American club also was a part of that. Like I said, up until we internationalized, our membership was very, very small because it was only American and the maritime fleet was shrinking at that time. Obviously, we are the only club, while all the clubs have a presence in the United States, not all of them, but many of them, they don't have an actual regulatory domicile like we do. The American club and all of its people in the United States are probably the most significant and the deepest bench in terms of know-how of managing and underwriting maritime casualties. We're very proud of that when we've been doing that for almost 110 years now. So we're not us personally, but the company itself. Obviously, we are very supportive and we are actually very active and we have relationships also with all the agencies. We actually ensure all of the Marad training vessels. We know all of the agencies very, very well. We have active relationships and we are very much a part of that American industry that is looking to bolster what's happening here in the United States. Joe, you need to build a ship and then join the club. You mentioned the door shipping startup, so it could happen. All right. Dorothea Ioannu and Steve Ogolukian. Thank you so much for coming on all bots. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having us. That was so great. Great conversation. That was really good. Thank you. All right, Joe, that was a fascinating episode. For sure. I feel like I am slowly getting a better handle on the maritime insurance industry. It is interesting to me how divided all those different risks are and to Steve's point, the idea being that, well, if you're a P&I club, you can price out the risks of going from A to B with a certain type of cargo in a certain predictable manner. But if you're doing war risk insurance, that's a very different kettle of fish. That's a maritime expression for you. Good job. Thanks. It actually makes a lot of sense to me, this idea that the pricing for war insurance would reset very quickly. Because one could imagine, say, buying a multi-year, you're going to buy this insurance and it's going to cover you for the next few years. Most of the time, there's not war. Most of the time, you don't want to be paying a war premium, etc. It's all just a trade-off. It's like, okay, no one loves it. A war breaks out so suddenly your premiums are going to surge the next week. I don't think anyone's very excited about that. But that's just the flip side for getting really low war risk insurance. The vast majority of the time when war is not going to be an issue for you. It's just a trade-off in terms of like, how long do you want to be paying for it and so forth. That actually made quite a bit of sense to me. Well, it also seems like the limiting factor on ships getting through the strait at the moment is not insurance at all. It's like whether you can survive. Yeah, the captains of the safety of the crew and just being sort of like a same. So even though insurers run the world, there are limits to the abilities of insurers, I would say, to affect you. I think it's really interesting. I also like, at first, I was like, well, how is a ship and their liability like a car? But then you see all their posters and it's saying all of these very safety things. You love those posters. No, they're really interesting because it's something like, make sure you're getting enough sleep. Are your hatches tight? Yeah, are your hatches tight? Don't check your email all the time. I think there's a drinking one too. Oh yeah, take control of fatigue, everything in moderation. So it's actually very similar to car to sort of liability insurance for a car, just in the fact that the basics of safety apply to a ship as well. I'm going to print out the cell phone one and get it framed and put it on your desk, Joe. That would be, I would like that. I would like that. All right, shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Laws podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wiesenthal. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez, at Carmen Arman, Dash O'Benet, at Dashbot, and Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks. And for more Odd Laws content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Odd Laws, where we have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all these topics 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash Odd Laws. 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