Register here for the January 8 Risky Science Podcast Live

This week on the Risky Science Podcast, I’m joined by Dr. Phillip Mulder of the University of Wisconsin, co-author of a newly released research paper examining how these insurance pressures are influencing who buys, who moves, and who can no longer afford to stay.

The research has drawn significant attention, including coverage in The New York Times. Dr. Mulder explains how one of the primary underlying forces in this emerging economic crisis is a series of “reinsurance shocks” — repricing events driven in part by catastrophe model estimates that are reverberating throughout the U.S. economy.

Our guest is Tim Boyce of TP ICAP, who has spent more than 25 years in financial markets, from US-dollar swaps in London to commodities in Singapore, before returning to the UK to build out the firm’s European weather business.

Tim describes weather as a “sleeping giant,” a market that should be much bigger given how energy, logistics, agriculture, and retail all rely on predictable weather and stable demand

We’ll talk about where demand is growing fastest, how better forecasting and satellite data are transforming hedging strategies, and why Tim sees weather derivatives and insurance as part of the same risk ecosystem — working together to get businesses the protection they need.

On today’s episode of the Risky Science Podcast, we’re stepping outside the usual finance lens and into a conversation that will push many of your assumptions about how risk, capital, and human health actually interact. Dr. Susan Erikson: medical anthropologist and author of Investable!, brings a perspective that most risk and financial professionals rarely engage with, but absolutely need to hear. Her work on pandemic bonds and the financialization of global health doesn’t just critique the structures we use; it forces us to rethink what “risk transfer” can and can’t solve when the underlying asset is human wellbeing.

Investable! When Pandemic Risk Meets Speculative Finance