Investment gets harder for Taiwan insurers

Negative spreads are likely to worsen among Taiwan's life insurance companies, forcing them to either invest more aggressively or curtail business activity, according to a new comment by Fitch.Most insurers in Taiwan continue to suffer from legacy business, when they wrote policies with guaranteed returns based on high interest rates during the 1990s. As a group they are weakly capitalised, in part because historically they have failed to earn decent investment returns.This has led th…