Résumé

The article is about the financial activity of global insurance companies over the past thirty years. While the development has been very successful, in general, the growth and extension of the financial market has made the sector more important, more diverse and more complex, thus introducing greater levels of risk. New products such as dDerivatives and sSecuritization have driven the significant growth of the sector over a long time period and they are one of the major causes of the financial crisis of 2008, in which millions of dollars were lost. Prior to the crisis, the performance of prudent insurance changed in 2005, as there were a significant number of big natural disasters, including hurricane Katrina. As a result, investments in dDerivatives and sSecuritization grew. Nonetheless, losses suffered by insurance companies were less than those experienced by banks.