California's insurer of last resort wants more

California's insurer of last resort wants more

The FAIR Plan is proposing to raise home insurance rates by an average of almost 36 percent. Private insurers are exiting the state, the FAIR Plan is being pushed to cover a hugely expanded range of policies, and wildfire home hardening grant programs — covering defensible space, retrofits, and fire-resistant materials — exist but are oversubscribed.

Gobble's Take: When the backstop starts buckling, homeowners don't get a safety net — they get a larger bill and a shrinking list of people willing to catch them.

Source: Perplexity Search (community: Reddit/HN)

Climate costs are a trillion-dollar problem — and accelerating

Bloomberg Intelligence's Climate Economy 2026 Outlook puts climate-related costs at $1.4 trillion in 2025, or about 1.2 percent of global GDP. For scale: spending across 1996 to 2005 totaled $2.4 trillion; spending across 2016 to 2025 totaled $12.2 trillion. A basket of 275 adaptation and mitigation companies beat the broader market by almost 32 percentage points in the year through April 19, 2026, with reinsurers among the named beneficiaries.

Gobble's Take: Insurance pricing isn't getting more expensive — it's getting less wrong. There's a difference, and the gap between those two things has been very profitable for climate-exposed assets.

Source: Perplexity Search (community news)

In Case You Missed It

Yesterday's top stories:

• California's insurance floor just got shoved a little higher
• The national residual-market picture is still huge, and California’s FAIR Plan is a giant inside it