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.
Register for Risky Science Live

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.
Subscribe to Risk Market News

A year ago, I sat down with Carmi Margalit, Managing Director and the Life Insurance Sector Lead at Standard & Poor’s Annual Insurance Conference to talk about private credit on insurance balance sheets . So when I caught up with him again this year,I figured it was time for a check-in.
And here's the thing that struck me: Carmi says not much has actually changed. The allocations have been growing for years. What's changed is everyone watching — the headlines, the regulators, the questions. So a lot of this conversation is about separating the perception from the mechanics.
We get into why the redemption gates you've been reading about are a private-credit-fund story and why this is a liquidity question and not an asset-liability question. We also get into issues like the growing role of offshore reinsurance and what it does to transparency. And what's actually on an analyst's radar for mortality and longevity — GLP-1s included.

This is the audio recording of our June 11 panel on the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season — three people who actually price this risk for a living, in conversation for an hour.

The ground they cover: where the cat models miss, how the ILS market is pricing the 2026 season, and how a new prediction-market contract could change what it means to "test" a hurricane model.

The Democratic Republic of Congo is in the middle of its 17th Ebola outbreak since 1976 and the WHO has declared a public health emergency of international concern. There are no approved vaccines. No approved treatments. Hundreds of suspected cases emerged before the outbreak was even confirmed. And the surveillance infrastructure needed to track it is operating in an active conflict zone.

For reinsurers and ILS investors, pandemic risk has always been the peril that's hardest to model, hardest to price, and hardest to transfer. The triggers don't work and the data is noisy.. And the market has largely walked away from the problem since COVID.

My guest today has spent his career working on exactly that problem from the science side. Dr. Ben Swallow is a lecturer in statistics at the University of St. Andrews, where he works at the intersection of Bayesian inference, uncertainty quantification, and epidemic modeling. He co-led the uncertainty quantification effort for the Scottish government during COVID. He's worked on Ebola outbreak analysis in West Africa. And he's currently part of the Isaac Newton Institute's program on pandemic preparedness.

Subscribe to Risk Market News

California’s homeowners insurance market, backed by privae capital, is still in retreat. The publicly-backed FAIR Plan is financial buckling. And somewhere in the gap between what the cat models capture and what's actually happening on the ground at the property level, there's a mispricing problem that nobody has fully solved yet.

In this episode of The Risky Science Podcast that wraps up my series of conversations from ClimateTech Connect in Washington this past April, I talk with Brian Bastian, Head of Product at Green Shield Risk Solutions — the analytics and MGA operation that's betting mitigation-first underwriting is the answer the admitted market can't quite get to yet.

Subscribe to Risk Market News

Ben Fidlow is a Fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society and leads analytics and risk advisory at Willis. In this episode, he explains how brokerage modeling differs fundamentally from carrier or vendor modeling — it's about what risk means to a specific client, not an aggregate book. He walks through Willis's expanded partnership with Moody's RMS, which lets his team layer their own climate extrapolations on top of current-day model outputs while retaining the ability to explain every step to clients. He also shares where he thinks AI is creating its most immediate value (converting unstructured client data into structured formats at scale), why federal data erosion is a real near-term problem, and what it would take for a direct capital market risk marketplace to eventually disintermediate both insurers and brokers.

Subscribe to Risk Market New