Heatproof.

Paper of Wreakage.

“Most mornings I learn more from New Items than I do from all of the traditional papers I read combined.” — Michael Blair, Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School and former presiding partner, Debevoise & Plimpton.

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1. The New York Times:

Homeowners in places most exposed to climate disasters are increasingly giving up on paying their insurance premiums, leaving them exposed to financial ruin, according to sweeping new government data.

The numbers show how climate change is eroding the underpinnings of American life by making home insurance costlier and harder to hang on to, even as wildfires, hurricanes and other calamities increasingly threaten what is, for many people, their most valuable asset.

“Homeowners’ insurance is where many Americans are now feeling the financial effect of climate change directly, in their pocketbook,” said Ethan Zindler, climate counselor at the Treasury Department. “Nature doesn’t really care whether people are living in a blue state or a red state or another state, or whether you do or don’t believe in climate change.”

The rising cancellation rates are part of a broader trend captured by the Treasury Department, which analyzed information for 246 million insurance policies issued by 330 insurers nationwide from 2018 through 2022. The result is the most comprehensive look yet at the effect of climate change on the American home insurance market. (Source: nytimes.com)

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2. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard:

The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is pushing a heady mix of Prussian imperial nostalgia and a shrewd form of Euroscepticism that catches the mood of post-globalist German voters.

The insurgent Right-wing party of Alice Weidel – a gay, Hayekian, Mandarin-speaking Goldman Sachs alumni, who worked for the Bank of China and wrote a paper on the Chinese pension system – is flying high as elections approach next month, reaching 22 percent in the latest INSA poll.

The German media fears that the “shy voter syndrome” may understate the strength of the AfD support. If the final tally reaches the mid-20s, it could leave Germany in much the same state of political paralysis as France, unable to form a stable government on the broken rubble of the old party system.

Foreign investors have persuaded themselves that Friedrich Merz, the Christian Democrat leader, is going to win a landslide on a manifesto of free market reform, fiscal stimulus and a blitz of investment. Germany is more likely to end up with the immobilism of another grand coalition, unable to rid itself of a social democrat dinosaur wedded to rust bowl industries and the obsolete model of the last century. (Source: telegraph.co.uk)