Weather derivatives have struggled with liquidity for 25 years. Jim Huang thinks prediction markets can finally fix that — but only if the contracts are built around events people actually watch.

In this return conversation with Risk Market News, the former CME product strategist and founder of Climate Hedge explains his pivot to WeatherBook, a weather-focused prediction market platform. Huang breaks down why China consolidated all weather index development into the Guangzhou Futures Exchange — pushing any weather futures launch to late 2027 or beyond — and why that regulatory reset opened a window for an event-driven alternative.
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In this week’s episode we are digging into California's insurance market — and specifically, into the fight over who actually owns wildfire risk. Is it the insurers pulling back from high-risk areas? The utilities whose equipment sparks some of these fires? Or the ratepayers and taxpayers left holding the bag when the bill comes due?

To help sort through it, I sat down with California State Senator Ben Allen, who's running for Insurance Commissioner. We got into reinsurance costs, catastrophe models, the FAIR Plan, capital requirements — and where the state's private-market approach diverges from the public alternative his opponent is proposing.

This week we focus on the tragic catastrophe in Venezuela, where powerful earthquakes tore along the San Sebastián fault and devastated Caracas. As a result, buildings collapsed, the airport shut down, and the death toll climbed.
And a fragile country recently facing its own political upheaval was left asking how this could happen on a fault everyone knew was dangerous.
My guest is Ziggy Lubkowski, earthquake engineer and Arup's global seismic expert. Arup is a global engineering and design consultancy, and Ziggy has spent nearly forty years studying the built environment—why some buildings stand and others fall—from Indonesia to Turkey to California.
We talk about what really drives the damage, why early loss estimates swing by billions, and the one earthquake-risk investment that pays back six to one.
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