Well, if they had taken the hint from October 5's "Is Your Strikes, Riots & Civil Commotion (SRCC) Insurance Coverage Up-to-Date?"....
From EuroNews, October 20:
At least 3,000 French shops were hit over the weekend. Insurers say they are mobilised, but lost trade may not be covered. Here is who pays the riot bill.
The number of shops damaged during France's weekend riots has reached at least 3,000, twice the figure reported just a day earlier.
Yet insurers, who are expected to pick up much of the bill, still have no estimate of what the destruction will cost them.
France Assureurs, the country's insurance federation, told Euronews that its members were "fully mobilised to support affected policyholders".
It could not provide an initial estimate of losses or say how many claims had been already filed.
Its crisis team is now working with public authorities across France following what the federation described as "extremely violent events".
French markets underperform as damage bill rises
On Sunday, Carrefour chief executive Alexandre Bompard, who also chairs the FCD retail federation, estimated that around 1,500 shops had been affected.He put the industry's losses at several hundred million euros.
By Monday, the government's count had reached 3,000.
Carrefour alone reported damage at 50 stores, including 20 that had been looted.
Financial markets were also under pressure on Monday. France's CAC 40 closed 1.1% lower, underperforming the broader Euro STOXX 600, down 0.9%.
Carrefour shares lost 2.2%, while luxury group LVMH fell 1.8%. A Louis Vuitton boutique in Marseille was among the stores broken into over the weekend.
Insurance stocks declined too. AXA shed 1.3% and reinsurer SCOR lost 0.9% in Paris. In Milan, Generali fell 2.3% and Unipol dropped 3.2%.
French government bonds also came under selling pressure on Monday.
The yield on the country's 10-year bonds rose by around eight basis points to 4.94%. Germany's equivalent yield increased by less than four basis points.
That widened the difference between French and German borrowing costs to approximately 148 basis points.
What the 2023 riots tell us about the cost
France has a recent benchmark for what a weekend like this can cost.The riots that swept the country in June and July 2023 resulted in €793 million in insured losses, France Assureurs told Euronews.
Insurers handled around 17,000 claims, averaging roughly €46,600 each.
Two-thirds of the total, about €523 million, went on shops and business premises. A quarter, close to €200 million, went to local authorities whose town halls, schools and buses had been attacked.
Cars made up the remaining 7%.
Even those figures did not capture the full extent of the destruction.
A subsequent French Senate inquiry estimated property damage at closer to €1 billion. Some losses had never been declared, while others were only partly covered by insurance.
The comparison is particularly relevant now because the number of shops affected appears to be higher.
CCI France counted around 2,500 vandalised businesses during the 2023 unrest. This weekend's government tally has already exceeded that figure.
France's new riot insurance scheme is not ready
France sought to address the insurance problems exposed by the 2023 riots in its 2026 budget law....
....MUCH MORE
As we saw during Covid, business interruption coverage is also important, and sometimes very contentious. If one is so inclined, many of our early links on Business Interruption can be found in October 2020's "BigLaw on Big Insurance: Covid-19 Business Interruption Claims In The UK".
If one is not so inclined just think of the boost to French GDP the rebuilding will produce.
It doesn't do anything for national wealth creation, Bastiat and his window and all that, but as with the falling-down bridges in China, GDP gets goosed. If interested see "That Which is Seen and That Which is Not Seen: Bastiat on Hurricane Sandy" and November 2012's:
"Frequent Bridge Collapses Help Boost China’s GDP"
...On Aug. 24, a 330-foot long approach ramp of Harbin’s Yangmingtan Bridge fell over, killing three and injuring five. The bridge had been in use less than a year and is the eighth bridge collapse in China this year. The Harbin administration has so far not openly addressed the case.
Zhao Wenjin, the lead commentator of Lanzhou Daily, commented on the incident, saying, “With each collapse, we need to reflect: why are we chasing GDP?”
According to a Jingyang Net report, Wang Yang, Party secretary of Guangdong Province, said at a provincial Party meeting in 2009: “Sometimes the GDP number looks good, but it didn’t really create wealth for society. It was, instead, a waste of society’s wealth.
“For example, building a bridge creates GDP. When the bridge collapses and is taken down, it creates another addition to the GDP. When the bridge is rebuilt, more GDP is created. As such, one bridge resulted in three additions to the GDP. But it was a tremendous waste of resources.”...MORE
