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Anyone know how insurance companies are reacting? That'd be interesting to watch, since they're all about risk management and have a lot of skin in the game.
by Reedx 7y ago
Anyone know how insurance companies are reacting? That'd be interesting to watch, since they're all about risk management and have a lot of skin in the game.
- symplee 7y agoCrossing their fingers for the next great bailout.
- dredmorbius 7y agoInsurance is definitely the point to watch. Real estate as investment makes sense only where the risk is insurable, and increasingly that's becoming less the case. If insurers won't insure, and banks can't get bailed out, mortgages won't get made, and property values will plummet. A recent realisation of mine is that the so-called FIRE sector (apt name...), Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate, effectively tripods itself. Finance provides the liquidity, insurance assesses and socialises risks, and real estate provides a huge share of the actual backing assets. If any one leg of that tripod starts to weaken, the entire structure is at risk. I ran across a pretty good explainer video from the WSJ yesterday on just this topic (or at least the "it's getting harder to insure" bits), mostly addressing California and wildfire, but also mentioning Florida and coastal storms. https://invidio.us/watch?v=7X3FmFDOiDc https://invidio.us/watch?v=7X3FmFDOiDc Looking for a good text treatment, that's not as easy to find at the moment.