Insurer Insolvencies Relatively High Since The Millenium

Following up on an earlier post on insurers leaving the auto and home insurance markets, I looked up the frequency of insurer insolvency in recent years, and was surprised to see that about 36 property/casualty insurers a year have become insolvent in recent years, three times the rate of the 1970s.
Mergers and acquisitions also help account for the decrease in the number of property/casualty insurers from 1,300 in 1990 to 900 in 2002. As the Insurance Services Office notes, however, the number of insolvenices is still only about a third of the yearly total in the late 1980s and 1990s.