BlackRock Finds $5 Trillion Industry Now Riskier Than in 2008

Insurers got burned badly in the 2008 financial crisis. So almost a decade later, BlackRock Inc. scoured the industry’s $5 trillion in U.S. investments to figure out how they would fare if markets crash so hard again.

The answer: Worse.

The world’s largest money manager mined regulatory filings of more than 500 insurance companies and modeled their portfolios in a similar downturn. Their stockpiles — underpinning obligations to policyholders across the nation — would drop by 11% on average, according to its calculations. That’s significantly steeper, BlackRock estimates, than the group’s “mark-to-market” losses during the depths of the crisis.

(Related: No Need for Bond Market Alarm. Really!)

The reason is pretty simple. Insurers needed to make up shortfalls after the crisis. But in a decade of low interest rates they had to venture beyond their traditional holdings of vanilla bonds. They now own vast amounts of stocks, high-yield debt and a variety of alternative assets — a bucket that can include hard-to-sell stakes in private equity investments, hedge funds and real estate.

“There is more risk being put into these portfolios every year,” Zach Buchwald, the head of BlackRock’s financial-institutions group for North America, said in an interview. And such shifts may become permanent, especially because many of the allocations are hard to reverse, he said.

The new diversity should provide a huge benefit, according to Buchwald. After all, it was concentrations of investments in mortgage-backed securities and certain equities that proved the biggest pitfalls during the crisis, a study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development found. In that case, insurers held onto many investments through the downturn and recovery, avoiding panicked sales that would lock in losses.

But even piles of investments that appear diverse can drop in value if care isn’t taken to ensure the assets won’t move in unison.

BlackRock examined the insurers’ holdings as it pitches a service called Aladdin. It didn’t publish the study. BlackRock is trying to sell the companies analytics and advice, helping them test how complex portfolios may perform under various conditions, so they can design them to withstand catastrophe.

‘Stretched Market’

The assessment comes at an interesting time. With U.S. stocks trading near record highs and the Federal Reserve starting to unwind years of extreme measures, there’s a raging debate on Wall Street over whether a big correction is looming — and if so, whether unforeseen faults in financial markets might crack open, as they did a decade ago.

“The strong ‘ quest for yield’ remains visible in non-banks,” Allianz SE Chief Economic Adviser Mohamed El-Erian said in a Bloomberg View column this month. The group, which typically includes insurers, has pushed into asset classes “including what most deem to be a stretched market for high-yield bonds.”