Insurance & Risk
The industry that prices risk for everyone else: how the pool, the price, the float, and the capital work; a short history from a Genoese contract of 1347 to the underwriting cycle; reinsurance and catastrophe bonds through the swing from the hard market of 2023 to the soft one of 2026; the climate repricing and the states' insurers of last resort, with the Los Angeles fires as the case; life insurance, annuities, and the private-equity model; health insurance after the enhanced subsidies expired; the casualty lines and the nuclear verdict; war-risk cover in the year the Strait of Hormuz closed, and cyber; how insurers fail; and the stocks. Written as of October 2026, after American property-casualty insurers' best year in a decade and as reinsurance prices fall. Where the field argues, from whether outside capital has tamed the cycle and whether premiums should follow the risk to whether the private-equity model endangers policyholders, whether the enhanced subsidies should return, and whether 'social inflation' is real, each side makes its case before the evidence. Opens with a market snapshot from one day's close, and its worked examples run on October's numbers, from an insurer's year to an annuity's balance sheet and an insurer's value.