State Farm, the cheery red-umbrella outfit from Bloomington, Illinois, has spent the last century selling Americans the comforting illusion that a tornado, texting teenager, or act of God can be monetised away. From a café terrace in Lisbon or a co-working pod in Singapore, the proposition looks less like prudent risk management and more like…
Storm Warnings From the Met Office: How a Small Island’s Weather Alerts Became the Planet’s Canary in the Coal Mine By Dave’s Locker’s resident correspondent, filing from a damp bar in Reykjavík with free Wi-Fi and cheaper existential dread. LONDON—At precisely 08:47 GMT last Tuesday, the British Met Office issued a “Danger to Life” amber…
Erie Insurance: The Quaint American Gamble That Might Just Outlast the Arctic Ice Shelf By Dave’s Locker International Desk In the grand casino of global finance, where Chinese shadow banks sell “wealth-management products” that smell suspiciously like 2008 and European insurers quietly re-price flood risk every time Venice orders new waders, sits a modest little…
UNCW News: How a Coastal Carolina Campus Became the Canary in Higher-Ed’s Coal Mine Wilmington, North Carolina—If you squint past the pastel beach rentals and the obligatory Confederate-gift-shop row, the University of North Carolina Wilmington looks like any other mid-tier American campus: palm trees, vape clouds, and a parking crisis that could be solved by…
The planet is now so comprehensively insured that, should a meteor obliterate the Eastern Seaboard tomorrow, actuaries in Zurich would yawn, adjust their spreadsheets, and schedule a Zoom call before the dust cloud reached Europe. In 2024, insurance is less a safety net than the world’s largest, most neurotic casino—one where every house always wins,…
Omaha, Nebraska – a city whose name most of the planet only recognises from a 1995 Soderbergh film or from Warren Buffett’s annual shareholder jamboree, where billionaires pretend that cherry Coke counts as a food group. Yet this modest Midwestern grid of stockyards and start-ups has quietly become a geopolitical Rorschach test: what you see…
Atlantic Tempests: How a Caribbean Puddle Party Hijacks the Global Mood By “Storm-Chasing” Santiago Vega, filing from a bar with Wi-Fi somewhere north of the hurricane belt Let us begin with the obvious: the Atlantic Ocean is not merely a large, salty inconvenience wedged between continents. It is Earth’s mood ring—turning from placid teal to…
State Farm, the good-neighbor insurer born in 1922 on the flat cornfields of Illinois, has quietly become the planet’s most polite hedge against chaos. While most nations still rely on fickle state budgets or the largesse of a benevolent despot to rebuild after the roof flies off, State Farm now underwrites the suburban dreams of…
Ghost of Yotei: The Specter Haunting Every Boardroom from Tokyo to Timbuktu By Our Far-Too-Frequent-Flyer Correspondent Tokyo—In the smoky backroom of a Shibuya izakaya last Friday, three salarymen toasted the quietest apocalypse in modern finance. Their clink of lowball glasses barely rose above the J-Pop B-side warbling from a 1990s-era karaoke machine, yet the gesture…
Emma Reynolds is not famous, yet her name has begun to surface in the kind of hushed, late-night Slack channels where risk officers and cyber-insurance brokers trade gallows humor about the end of civilization. To the wider world she remains a footnote, but footnotes, as any historian will tell you, are where the devil hides…
