In some parts of Australia, what Summerhayes was describing was already a fact of life. Across the cyclone-prone north, the cost of home insurance has increased by 178% since 2007, while the price for combined home and contents insurance has grown by 122%.
These comments have since been read as a rebuke to the attitude taken by some in industry that as climate crisis gets worse the simple solution is to pass the risk – and the cost – on to the consumer. In one example, Nicholas Scofield, the chief corporate affairs officer for Allianz Australia, appeared before a hearing of the Senate’s bushfire inquiry in July 2020. The committee chair, Labor senator Tim Ayres, asked him whether climate change represented an “existential threat for the industry in some parts of Australia”.
“From our point of view in terms of thinking of the financial system as a whole, it’s not enough if insurers have the capacity to pay every claim, but there’s a shrinking number of people who can actually secure insurance,” Carmody told the hearing.
“You could extrapolate to a tiny pool where no one has an insurance policy but every claim can be paid. That might still mean there is no insolvency problem at an insurance level, but from a financial system point of view, that represents a failure.”
Carmody said the regulator had been regularly advising large financial institutions about the financial risks posed by climate change.
Dai Xianglong
Dai Xianglong, a former governor of the People s Bank of China and former head of the National Social Security Fund, is calling for allocating a proportion of assets confiscated from corrupt officials and a proportion of land transfer fees to replenish pension reserves.
At a pension reserves forum hosted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on December 19, Dai said the amount of assets confiscated from corrupt officials could total billions of yuan.
In recent years, with the increasing number of elderly in China, the sustainability of the pension fund is under threat. In 2019, the balance of social insurance funds nationwide was Rmb585.486 billion, and after fiscal subsidies were excluded, there was a deficit for the seventh consecutive year.