While higher interest rates and a new market regime are stressing many investors, to insurance companies, today’s markets feel closer to normalcy — and their investment performance has left them feeling confident about how they have constructed their portfolios.
The “last 12 years have been abnormal, today is normal,” said a chief investment officer at an insurance company, one of almost 50 CIOs who participated in KKR’s first insurance survey since 2021. The group surveyed oversees a total of more than $8 trillion in assets. Half were based in the U.S., a third were based in Europe, and the rest in Asia or elsewhere.
A little context: The last time KKR did the survey there were $15 trillion of negative-yielding fixed income assets in aggregate. “Today, by comparison, that number is zero,” a report on the survey says. Insurers tend to…
