Living in New York you hear things like, when everyone wears black and brown is the new it-color of the season, "brown is the new black." You also hear things like "forty is the new twenty" from aging Gen-Xers and "sixty is the new forty" from aging baby-boomers.
That's the basis for the title of this post. In this case, though, I'm talking about the insurance industry's point of view.
Back in the eighties and nineties in America, natural disasters like the earthquake in the Bay Area that interrupted the World Series and Hurricane Andrew, took the insurance industry to the cleaners. Companies raised premiums for oceanside residences and commercial spaces to astronomical heights, and those that didn't raise their prices got out entirely. They moved inland, to safer places, or so it seemed.
What's being called 'extreme weather" is just a part of our ever-changing climate, something we're going to have to get used to says our scientists. The recent tornadoes in Tuscaloosa and Joplin are evidence that the interior may not be as safe for the insurance industry as they might have thought.
This has prompted cynical observers to say that the Midwest and South are the Beaches.
I wouldn't write a post fishing for sympathy for the insurance industry, and, in fact, I get a mischievous smirk when I think that they can't find solace anywhere.
There is, of course, nothing smirk-worthy about the tragedies in Missouri or Alabama, or any of the other places ravaged by nature in the past months and years.
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