International
Is the attempted assassination of anti-globalist Slovakian prime minister a warning of things to come?
Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico
From LifeSiteNews
By Angeline Tan
On April 10 of this year, Fico ominously predicted that assassination attempts like the one on his life could very well happen in his country:
And I’m just waiting for this frustration, intensified by Dennik N, SME or Aktuality (Slovak news), to turn into the murder of some of the leading government politicians.
On May 15, Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico was shot in what the country’s Interior Minister Matúš Šutaj Eštok described as a “politically motivated” assassination attempt, according to reports from Euractiv.
Based on eyewitnesses cited by Euractiv, Fico was greeting people at the House of Culture in the Slovak city of Handlová when he was shot.
Eštok cautioned that Slovakia was “on the edge of a civil war” owing to political disagreements with the Fico government, also declaring that Juraj Cintula, the 71-year-old man who fired five bullets at Fico, may have “acted as part of a group of people that had been encouraging each other to carry out an assassination,” as per Reuters reports.
According to local reports, just two hours after Cintula’s attempted killing of Fico, the suspect’s “communication history” online was deleted.
While Slovak authorities found that Cintula had no prior criminal record, he had been outspokein in his opposition to Fico’s government. Materials uploaded on social media depicted Cintula participating in an anti-Fico protest, chanting, “Long live Ukraine!”
Based on reports by Slovak media, Cintula told police that he had planned the attack a few days prior, but that he did not plan on killing Fico.
The CNN news outlet quoted Eštok as saying:
The reasons (the suspect gave) were the decision to abolish the special prosecutor’s office, the decision to stop supplying military assistance to Ukraine, the reform of the public service broadcaster and the dismissal of the judicial council head.
Interestingly, the reactions of mainstream media outlets to Fico’s attack belie their bias against the bullet-ridden Slovak leader, whose Smer-Social Democracy Party won last year’s elections on a campaign that resisted mass migration, guarded national sovereignty against centralized European Union control, and lambasted NATO’s military aid to Ukraine.
For instance, the BBC news outlet had this to say:
Fico has been accused of cosying up to figures like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, which has led some analysts to speculate that he might be trying to steal a page from the regime of a leader described by the European Parliament as running a ‘hybrid regime of electoral autocracy.’
Likewise, the U.K.’s Daily Mail portrayed Fico as a “pro-Putin” “anti-vaxxer”:
Critics argue that he has abandoned Slovakia’s pro-Western course..he is fiercely opposed to immigration and has criticized same-sex marriages. He became the country’s most prominent voice against masks, lockdowns and vaccinations during the Covid pandemic. He is also an admirer of Vladimir Putin and has vowed not to support Ukraine.
Furthermore, Sky News claimed that “Fico has long been a divisive figure,” characterizing the Slovak leader as “pro-Russian, anti-American.” Responding to mainstream media outlets’ “palpable coldness” to Fico’s shooting, particularly that of Sky News, Brendan O’Neill wrote in The Spectator:
A guest commentator said Fico’s views are ‘very divisive in Slovakia’ and ‘very divisive in the EU’. And therefore – wait for it – ‘it’s not surprising that this sort of event might take place’. Got that? Because Fico is a controversial figure, according to the EU anyway, it shouldn’t be a great shock that someone decided to shoot him. It is hands down the most disturbing thing I’ve heard on a mainstream news channel in some time. A democratically elected leader is riddled with bullets, Slovakian democracy itself is horrifically assaulted, and you’re not surprised?
O’Neill added:
The commentator on Sky listed Fico’s supposedly problematic views. He’s a populist and a nationalist, we were informed. Worse, he opposes military aid for Ukraine. What are we saying here? That it is ‘not surprising’ if public figures who hold such views – that nationhood is important, that the EU can be a pain in the backside, that aid to Ukraine should stop – are set upon by maniacs? This strikes me as a very dangerous message.
Fico’s supporters have blamed the onslaught of media villainization of the leader as one of the causes that prompted Cintula to shoot him. Eštok also decried the unfavorable media coverage of Fico:
It was information that you have recently presented. The way you presented them, I think each of you can reflect.
As Conor Gallagher wrote in Naked Capitalism:
… it’s the questioning of the NATO line and opposition to digging the Project Ukraine hole even deeper that got Fico and Smer in hot water with the Atlanticists that run Europe nowadays. Fico and Smer are relentlessly labeled pro-Russia for nothing more than their belief that Project Ukraine is not good for Slovakia. Not that there’s anything wrong with being pro-Russia, but since when does not wanting to go to war with Russia make one ‘pro-Russia’?
In comments about mainstream media portrayals of the Eurosceptic Fico as “pro-Russian,” Sputnik columnist Dmitry Babich said:
Such clichés became commonplace in mainstream European press against any non-systemic political leader who stands for his or her country’s sovereignty or veers from the EU’s ‘common foreign policy,’ not necessarily in unison with Russia.
On the same note, senior research fellow at the Global Policy Institute George Szamuely remarked:
[The alleged shooter is] basically on the same side as all of the EU media, the EU apparat, all the EU political figures who have been denouncing Fico and Slovakia for their supposed pro-Putin, for his supposed pro-Putin agenda, for his being in the service of the Kremlin. {The media has] come up with another story, which is that, somehow, Fico brought this on himself… because he’s such a polarizing figure. He’s so divisive and the political atmosphere in Slovakia is very, very toxic. A lot of hatred, a lot of hate speech. And, who’s behind it all? Robert Fico.
“There is social polarization and political antagonism in all of Europe, but usually nobody is shooting at prime ministers. [This happened] only in Slovakia,” Dimitris Konstantakopoulos, a former security and foreign policy advisor to late former Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, declared in statements to Sputnik, commenting on the dangerous situation which has developed in the heart of Europe in the wake of the attempt on Fico’s life.
“What people will think all around Europe is that this is a signal to any politician who would like to disagree with the main NATO and the European Union policies – that he has to be careful not to be assassinated,” Konstantakopoulos elaborated.
“I will remind you that they have already blown up the Nord Stream pipeline, and we’ve also had the assassination or attempted assassination of Russian journalists and politicians inside Russia. So it seems that [going back] long ago there was a ‘war party’ in the West which has decided not to permit a Russian victory in Ukraine. And that means using all possible means,” Konstantakopoulos highlighted.
Pro-Ukraine forces hoping to “discipline” leaders who do not support Ukraine in its conflict against Russia can use violence or other ways to push their agenda forward, Konstantakopoulos told Sputnik.
In context, Brussels has previously threatened to undermine the economy of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary if he vetoes Ukraine’s attempt to become an EU member. Also, in May this year, the Verden regional court in Lower Saxony, Germany, ruled that the Rotenburg Eurosceptic Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) leader Marie-Thérèse Kaiser was guilty of “incitement to hatred” for posting crime statistics showing that Afghanistan refugees committed a disproportionate number of sex offenses in the country.
The German court’s ruling caught the attention of billionaire Elon Musk, with Musk posting:
Are you saying the fine was for repeating accurate government statistics? Was there anything inaccurate in what she said?
Last year, AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla was reportedly attacked with a syringe, causing him to go into anaphylactic shock, during an election campaign event in Ingolstadt, Bavaria. Nevertheless, the Associated Press (AP), citing German prosecutors and police, stated that “there were no indications yet that Chrupalla was attacked.”
Days earlier, Alice Weidel, another AfD co-leader, along with her family, had been scurried away to an undisclosed location for safety following intelligence reports of an upcoming attack on the nationalist politician. Rather than keeping silent or denouncing violence, leftist German Green Party MP Renate Künast, in an X post, questioned if Weidel had staged the “security problem to suit the election” in Bavaria at that time.
On April 10 of this year, Fico ominously predicted that assassination attempts like the one on his life could very well happen in his country:
And I’m just waiting for this frustration, intensified by Dennik N, SME or Aktuality (Slovak news), to turn into the murder of some of the leading government politicians.
Fico’s ominous predictions are not entirely unfounded, given the history of covert operations (that were sometimes violent) in Europe.
Following Fico’s shooting, India-based news outlet Firstpost ran an article citing U.S. journalist Nebojsa Malic and Habertürk reporter Ozcan Tikit stating that a continuation of “Operation Gladio” was linked to the attempt on Fico’s life.
The same article described Operation Gladio as “a clandestine operation involving a network of ‘stay-behind’ armies established in Europe during the Cold War,” backed “by NATO and the CIA with the cooperation of European intelligence agencies,” to gear up for a possible invasion by the then-Soviet Union.
Notably, the article reported that “NATO played a central role in coordinating these secret armies aiming to ensure that resistance would continue even if the official military forces were defeated or occupied,” ensuring “violent incidents including bombings and assassinations to destabilize the political situation.”
Firstpost added:
While initially intended as a defensive measure against a Soviet invasion, some of these groups became involved in internal political activities including influencing elections, engaging in acts of terrorism and manipulating political processes to counteract left-wing movements and parties.
Strikingly, while Fico has been labeled as “pro-Russia” by many mainstream media outlets, these same media outlets were quick to point out his attacker’s apparent links to pro-Russia paramilitaries and anti-immigrant forces, rather than highlight the attacker’s sympathies for the Kyiv regime under anti-Christian leader Volodymyr Zelensky. Ironically, Sky News reported the fact that Cintula, the would-be assassin, had commemorated the birthday of Marxist terrorist Che Guevara, a key figure in the Cuban revolution.
Evidently, the EU globalists, as echoed by their sycophants in establishment media outlets, have revealed their true colors once again via their reactions to Fico’s shooting. In view of the impending European Parliament elections from June 6 to 9, during which conservative and Eurosceptic politicians are set to win many votes, it is very likely that the globalist brahmins in Brussels and their coterie are panicking to retain power, even as their legitimacy to lead is declining.
In desperation, it would not be surprising if more assassinations (both physical and character) aimed at dissident leaders or public figures take place in the future.
ACIP voted to un-recommend the Hep B birth dose, but here’s the problem: they still can’t weigh the other side of the ledger
Sunday, something happened that has never happened in the history of American public health: ACIP voted 8-3 to un-recommend the universal birth dose of hepatitis B for babies born to mothers who test negative for the virus. After 34 years of jabbing every American newborn within hours of taking their first breath—regardless of whether their mother had hepatitis B—the committee finally acknowledged what 25 European countries figured out decades ago: it doesn’t make sense.
But watching this vote unfold, I couldn’t help but notice the absurdity of the debate itself. Committee members who opposed the change kept saying variations of the same thing: “We’ve heard ‘do no harm’ as a moral imperative. We are doing harm by changing this wording.” Another said “no rational science has been presented” to support the change.
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And therein lies the fundamental problem with ACIP—and with the entire vaccine regulatory apparatus in America. They literally cannot weigh risk versus benefit because they only have data on one side of the scale.
The Missing Side of the Ledger
When ACIP debates adding or removing a vaccine from the schedule, they can produce endless data on disease incidence. They can show you charts demonstrating how hepatitis B cases in infants dropped from thousands to single digits after 1991. They can model projected infections if vaccination rates decline. They have this data at their fingertips because tracking infectious disease is something our public health apparatus actually does.
But ask them to produce equivalent data on vaccine injury, and you’ll get silence. Not “the data shows injuries are rare.” Not “here’s our comprehensive tracking of adverse events.” Just… nothing. A void where information should be.
This is not an accident. This is by design.
The safety trials for Engerix-B and Recombivax HB—the two hepatitis B vaccines given to American newborns—monitored adverse events for four to five days after injection. That’s it. If your baby developed seizures on day six, or regressed into autism over the following months, or developed autoimmune disease in the following year—none of that would appear in the pre-licensure safety data.
And the post-market surveillance? VAERS is a voluntary reporting system that the CDC itself acknowledges captures only a tiny fraction of adverse events. A Harvard-funded study found it captures perhaps 1% of actual vaccine injuries. Vaccine court has paid out over $5 billion in claims while simultaneously being structured to make filing nearly impossible for average families.
So when Dr. Cody Meissner voted against removing the Hep B birth dose and said he saw “clear evidence of the benefits” but “not the harms,” he was accidentally revealing the entire rotten structure. Of course he doesn’t see the harms. Nobody is systematically looking for them.
The Invisibility of Vaccine Injury
Here’s what most people don’t understand about vaccine injury: it’s nothing like a gunshot wound.
If you shoot someone, the cause is obvious. There’s a bullet, a wound, blood, a clear mechanism of action visible to any observer. Even a medical examiner who’s never seen the victim before can determine cause of death.
Vaccine injury doesn’t work that way. When aluminum nanoparticles from a vaccine cross the blood-brain barrier via macrophages, when they lodge in brain tissue and trigger chronic neuroinflammation, when a child slowly regresses over weeks or months—there’s no bullet. There’s no smoking gun. There’s just a before and an after, and a desperate parent trying to explain to doctors that something changed.
This invisibility is the vaccine program’s greatest protection. Because the injury mechanism is complex and delayed, because it doesn’t leave an obvious wound, because it requires actually looking to find—and because no one in authority is looking—the injuries simply don’t exist in the official record.
I watched my own son Jamie regress after his vaccines. A healthy, developing toddler who lost his words, stopped making eye contact, and retreated into a world we couldn’t reach. My wife and I know what happened. Thousands of other parents know the same thing happened to their children. But because this type of injury doesn’t show up on a simple blood test, because there’s no autopsy finding that says “vaccine-induced encephalopathy,” ACIP members can sit in a room and say with straight faces that they don’t see evidence of harm.
They’re not lying. They literally can’t see it. Because no one is measuring it.
The Chicken Pox Conundrum
Here’s an example that illustrates the insanity of our current approach.
The varicella (chicken pox) vaccine was added to the schedule in 1995. It definitely reduces chicken pox cases. The data is clear on that front. Mission accomplished, right?
But what about the other side of the ledger?
Emerging research suggests that wild chicken pox infection provides some protective effect against brain cancers—particularly glioma, the most common type of primary brain tumor. Multiple studies have found that people who had chicken pox as children have significantly lower rates of brain cancer later in life. The hypothesis is that the immune response to wild varicella provides lasting immunological benefits that extend far beyond preventing itchy spots.
Meanwhile, the vaccine itself has been associated with increased rates of autoimmune conditions. Studies have linked varicella vaccination to higher rates of herpes zoster (shingles) outbreaks in younger age groups, to autoimmune disorders, to various adverse events that weren’t captured in the original short-term safety trials.
So what’s the true risk-benefit of the chicken pox vaccine? Does preventing a week of itchy discomfort in childhood justify potentially increased rates of brain cancer and autoimmune disease later in life?
ACIP can’t answer this question. They literally don’t have the data. They can show you chicken pox cases going down. They cannot show you a comprehensive analysis of long-term neurological and immunological outcomes in vaccinated versus unvaccinated populations, because that study has never been done.
And so they keep recommending the vaccine based on the only data they have—the disease prevention data—while remaining willfully blind to consequences they’ve never bothered to measure.
The ACIP Paradox
Sunday’s vote was historic, but it also revealed the fundamental paradox of vaccine regulation in America.
The committee members who voted to remove the universal Hep B birth dose recommendation did so largely based on comparative evidence from Europe, parental concerns, and the basic logic that vaccinating a 12-hour-old baby for a sexually transmitted disease their mother doesn’t have makes no medical sense. They were right to do so.
But the committee members who voted against the change weren’t wrong either, from their perspective. They looked at the only data they have—disease prevention data—and concluded that removing the recommendation could lead to more hepatitis B cases. And within their limited framework, they’re correct.
The problem is the framework itself.
True risk-benefit analysis requires data on both risks AND benefits. ACIP has comprehensive data on benefits (disease prevention) and virtually no data on risks (vaccine injury). So every decision they make is fundamentally flawed from the start.
When Dr. Joseph Hibbeln complained that “no rational science has been presented” to support changing the recommendations, he was inadvertently indicting the entire system. Of course no comprehensive vaccine injury data was presented—such data doesn’t exist because no one has been willing to collect it.
This is like asking someone to make an informed financial decision while only showing them potential profits and hiding all possible losses. Of course the decision will be skewed. Of course you’ll end up with a bloated portfolio of high-risk investments that look great on paper.
The Real Reform
If RFK Jr. and the new HHS leadership want to actually fix the vaccine program, they need to understand that removing individual vaccines or making them “optional” is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
The real reform is creating the data infrastructure that should have existed from the beginning.
We need a comprehensive, long-term, vaccinated-versus-unvaccinated health outcomes study. Not a five-day safety trial. A multi-decade tracking of neurological, immunological, and developmental outcomes across populations with varying vaccination status. Florida just eliminated all vaccine mandates—that state alone could provide the data we need within ten years if someone had the courage to actually collect it.
We need a vaccine injury surveillance system that actually captures adverse events. Not a voluntary reporting system that misses 99% of injuries. An active surveillance system with trained clinicians looking for the kinds of delayed, complex injuries that vaccines actually cause.
We need accountability for manufacturers. The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act removed all liability from vaccine makers—and predictably, the vaccine schedule exploded afterward while safety research stagnated. Why would any company invest in safety when they can’t be sued for injuries?
Without this data, every ACIP meeting will be the same performance we watched this week: members confidently citing disease prevention data while admitting they can’t see evidence of harm—not because harm doesn’t exist, but because no one is looking for it.
What Comes Next
Sunday’s vote was a crack in the wall. For the first time, an American regulatory body acknowledged that perhaps vaccinating every newborn within hours of birth for a disease primarily transmitted through sex and IV drug use doesn’t make sense when the mother has already tested negative.
But the forces of institutional inertia are already mobilizing. The American Academy of Pediatrics is “disappointed.” The American Medical Association is calling for the CDC to reject the recommendation. The pharmaceutical industry—which collects over $225 million annually from Hep B birth doses alone—will fight to restore the universal recommendation.
They will cite the same data they always cite: disease prevention data. Cases prevented. Infections avoided. Lives saved—theoretically.
They will not cite vaccine injury data, because that data doesn’t exist in any comprehensive form. They will not present long-term health outcomes in vaccinated versus unvaccinated children, because those studies have been actively avoided for decades. They will not acknowledge the thousands of families who have watched their children regress after vaccination, because those injuries aren’t captured in any official database.
And this is why ACIP will always be hamstrung. Until we build the data infrastructure to actually measure vaccine injury—to put real numbers on the other side of the ledger—every vaccine decision will be based on incomplete information. Every “risk-benefit analysis” will be a fraud, because we’re only measuring half the equation.
The hepatitis B birth dose vote was a small victory. But the larger battle—for actual science, for complete data, for true informed consent—that battle is just beginning.
And until we win it, ACIP will continue making decisions in the dark, confidently citing evidence of benefits while remaining deliberately blind to the harms they’ve never bothered to measure.
About the author
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J.B. Handley is the proud father of a child with Autism. He spent his career in the private equity industry and received his undergraduate degree with honors from Stanford University. His first book, How to End the Autism Epidemic, was published in September 2018. The book has sold more than 75,000 copies, was an NPD Bookscan and Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller, broke the Top 40 on Amazon, and has more than 1,000 Five-star reviews. Mr. Handley and his nonspeaking son are also the authors of Underestimated: An Autism Miracle and co-produced the film SPELLERS, available now on YouTube.
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We’ve all seen the headlines — such as the below — loudly proclaiming that due to climate change the insurance industry is in crisis, and even that total economic collapse may soon follow. For instance, since 2019, the New York Times, one of the primary champions of this narrative, has published more than 1,250 articles on climate change and insurance.
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Climate advocates have embraced the idea of a climate-fueled insurance crisis as it neatly ties together the hyping of extreme weather and alleged financial consequences for ordinary people. The oft-cited remedy to the claimed crisis is, of course, to be found in energy policy: “The only long-term solution to preserve an insurable future is to transition from fossil fuels and other greenhouse-gas-emitting industries.”
However, it is not just climate advocates promoting the notion that climate change is fundamentally threatening the insurance industry. A climate-risk industrial complex has emerged in this space and a lot of money is being made by a lot of people. The virtuous veneer of climate advocacy serves to discourage scrutiny and accountability.
In this series, I take a deep dive into the “crisis,” its origins, its politics, and its tenuous relationship with actual climate science.¹ Today, I kick things off by sharing three fundamental, and perhaps surprising, facts that go a long way to explaining why insurance prices have increased and who benefits:
- Property/casualty insurance is raking in record profits;
- Insurance underwriting returns vary year-to-year but show no trend;
- “Climate” risk assessments are unreliable and a cause of higher insurance prices.
Grab a cup of coffee, settle in, and let’s go . . .
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Property/casualty insurance is raking in record profits
This year is shaping up to be an extremely profitable year for the property/casualty (P/C) insurance industry. In a report covering the first six months of 2025, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) shares the good news (emphasis added):
Despite heavy catastrophe losses, including the costliest wildfires on record, the U.S. Property & Casualty (P&C) industry recorded its best mid-year underwriting gain in nearly 20 years.
In the second half of 2025, returns got even better for the P/C industry. According to a new report from S&P Global Intelligence, as reported by Carrier Management (emphases added):
For U.S. P/C insurers, it just doesn’t get any better than this. . . With a combined ratio of 89.1 for third-quarter 2025, the U.S. property/casualty insurance industry had its best quarter in at least a quarter of a century—and maybe longer, S&P Market Intelligence said.
Taking a longer view, the extremely profitable 2025 follows significant industry profitability in 2023 and 2024, according to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), as shown in the figure below.
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What accounts for the high profits?
The NAIC explains:
Strong premium growth, driven largely by rate increases, coupled with abating economic inflation . . . Net income nearly doubled compared to last year, attributed to the underwriting profit and healthy investment returns.
Below, I’ll pick up the issue of rate increases and explore one big reason why they have occurred.
If there is a P/C insurance crisis, it may be in figuring out how to explain its impressive returns at the same time that the climate lobby is telling everyone that the industry is collapsing.
Insurance underwriting returns vary year-to-year but show no trend
The P/C industry makes money primarily in two ways — underwriting of insurance policies and investment income. Typically, insurance companies seek to break even, or lose little, on insurance underwriting and earn profits on investment income.
Warren Buffet, in his 2009 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, explained concisely how the P/C industry works:
Our property-casualty (P/C) insurance business has been the engine behind Berkshire’s growth and will continue to be. It has worked wonders for us. We carry our P/C companies on our books at $15.5 billion more than their net tangible assets, an amount lodged in our “Goodwill” account. These companies, however, are worth far more than their carrying value– and the following look at the economic model of the P/C industry will tell you why.
Insurers receive premiums upfront and pay claims later. In extreme cases, such as those arising from certain workers’ compensation accidents, payments can stretch over decades. This collect-now, pay-later model leaves us holding large sums– money we call “float”– that will eventually go to others. Meanwhile, we get to invest this float for Berkshire’s benefit. Though individual policies and claims come and go, the amount of float we hold remains remarkably stable in relation to premium volume. Consequently, as our business grows, so does our float.
If premiums exceed the total of expenses and eventual losses, we register an underwriting profit that adds to the investment income produced from the float. This combination allows us to enjoy the use of free money– and, better yet, get paid for holding it. Alas, the hope of this happy result attracts intense competition, so vigorous in most years as to cause the P/C industry as a whole to operate at a significant underwriting loss. This loss, in effect, is what the industry pays to hold its float. Usually this cost is fairly low, but in some catastrophe-ridden years the cost from underwriting losses more than eats up the income derived from use of float.
The figure below, using data from the Insurance Information Institute, shows the underwriting performance of the P/C industry from 2004 to 2024.
The time series shows lots of ups and downs, but no trend — by design, as Buffet explained. There are certainly no signs of an underwriting crisis, much less indications of a coming collapse. The P/C industry looks both well-managed and healthy.
“Climate” risk assessments are unreliable and a cause of higher insurance prices
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If profits are high and underwriting is steady, then what then accounts for increasing insurance prices — which, as of the end of 2024, increased 29 consecutive quarters in a row (above)?
A big part of the answer is Climate Change. But not how you might think.
A decade ago, Mark Carney — then Governor of the Bank of England and today Prime Minister of Canada — gave an influential speech titled, Breaking the Tragedy of the Horizon – climate change and financial stability.
Carney argued that the insurance industry was at risk due to changes in the climatology of extreme events that were not properly understood by experts in the industry:
[T]here are some estimates that currently modelled losses could be undervalued by as much as 50% if recent weather trends were to prove representative of the new normal. . . Such developments have the potential to shift the balance between premiums and claims significantly, and render currently lucrative business non-viable.
Coincident with Carney’s 2015 speech, the Bank of England released a report on the impacts of climate change on the insurance industry, and noted that conventional catastrophe modeling did not effectively consider a changing climate. The Bank of England kicked off a longstanding campaign to convince people that extreme weather events were changing dramatically in the near term.
Subsequently, in 2019, the Bank of England required firms to assess their “climate risks.” This guidance was updated last week. In (a coordinated) parallel effort, national and international organizations focused on “climate risk” to the financial sector started multiplying — such as the Climate Financial Risk Forum and the Network for Greening the Financial System.
The climate-risk industry was born circa 2019.
There is an incredible story to be told here (and Jessica Weinkle is the go-to expert), but for today, the key takeaways are that (a) the notion of “climate risk” to finance, including insurance, led to the creation of a “climate risk” industry, and (b) within this industry, a new family of risk assessment vendors emerged, promising to satisfy the new demands for climate risk disclosure and risk modeling.
The Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP) explains:
As this [“climate risk”] was a new discipline for most financial firms, many turned to third party providers (“vendors”) to help them with different areas of expertise. There are now many physical risk data vendors, which offer a variety of services to financial institutions. While vendor offerings often sound alike — providing projections of how physical risk could evolve for locations across a range of risks and climate scenarios — they can differ significantly in terms of features, approach, or suitability for specific needs, and the underlying models that these providers use differ in methodology and assumptions.
GARP just published an incredibly important study that assessed how 13 different “climate risk” vendors modeled physical risk and risk of loss across 100 individual structures around the world.²
The results are shocking — given how they are used in industry, but should not be surprising — given what we know about modeling.
There is absolutely no consensus across vendors about “climate risk” in terms of either physical risks or risks of loss.
The figure below shows, for 100 different properties around the world, the differences in modeled 200-year flood risk across the 13 vendors, as refelcted in modeled flood heights. The maximum difference among the properties across vendors is about 12 meters and the median difference is about 2.7 meters — These are huge differences.
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In terms of risk of loss, the models have an even greater spread. The figure below shows that for a modeled 200-year flood, 10 properties are modeled by at least one vendor to have total losses (100%) while another vendor models the same properties to have no losses, under the exact same event. The median difference between minimum and maximum modeled loss ratio is 30% — Another huge number.³
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Insurance pricing does not scale linearly with increasing modeled loss ratios. Consider that the difference between a modeled 10% loss ratio and a 40% loss ratio (i.e., the 30% median difference across vendors from above) might result in a 10x increase in insurance rates. Risk adverse insurers have incentives to price at the most extreme modeled loss.
Model inaccuracies, unceratinties, spread, and ambiguity are feature not flaws when it comes to making money. “Climate risk” modeling has resulted in a financial windfall not just for the newly created climate analytics industry, but also for insurers and reinsurers who have seen the envelope of modeled losses expand. The need for new models, of questionabl fidelity, are necessary to satisfy industry guidance and government regulators.
The net result has been a seemingly scientific justification for increasing insurance rates.⁴
There are of course real changes in physical risk, exposure, and vulnerability as well as the regulatory and political contexts within which the P/C industry must operate. The discipline of catastrophe modeling has long integrated these factors to assess risks. As insurance policies and reinsurance contracts are typically implemented on a one-year basis, and this well-positioned to incorporate changng perceptions of risk, this series will explore why a new “climate risk” assessment industry was even needed in the first place.
What about that “climate risk”? THB readers will be very familiar with the science of extreme events and climate change, which, as reported here, happens to be consistent with both the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and those in the legacy catastrophe modeling community.
One of those modeling firms, Verisk, gets the last word for today:
We estimate about 1% of year-on-year increases in AAL [Average Annual Loss] are attributable to climate change. Such small shifts can easily get lost behind other sources of systematic loss increase discussed in this report, such as inflation and exposure growth. The random volatility from internal climate variability also dwarfs the small positive climate change signal.
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Alberta Sports Hall of Fame Announces Class of 2026 Inductees
Why Does Canada “Lead” the World in Funding Racist Indoctrination?
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Bruce Dowbiggin1 day agoWayne Gretzky’s Terrible, Awful Week.. And Soccer/ Football.
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espionage2 days agoWestern Campuses Help Build China’s Digital Dragnet With U.S. Tax Funds, Study Warns
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Health1 day agoCDC Vaccine Panel Votes to End Universal Hep B Vaccine for Newborns
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Business1 day agoCanada invests $34 million in Chinese drones now considered to be ‘high security risks’
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Opinion2 days agoThe day the ‘King of rock ‘n’ roll saved the Arizona memorial
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Focal Points2 days agoCommon Vaccines Linked to 38-50% Increased Risk of Dementia and Alzheimer’s
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Agriculture2 days agoCanada’s air quality among the best in the world
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Business1 day agoThe EU Insists Its X Fine Isn’t About Censorship. Here’s Why It Is.