Summer is over, but the Swiss InsurTech Hub’s schedule isn’t: To kick off the second half of the year, the community brought together four new insurtech companies, a newly acquired sponsorship partner, and the anticipation of the association’s fifth anniversary. Innovation, as is clear, takes no summer break.

Silvia Signoretti, President of the Swiss InsurTech Hub (SIH), opened the General Assembly by noting the busy schedule of the coming weeks. The Risk Resilience Summit, a collaboration with Swiss Re and several partners, took place on September 3 and was completely sold out. In addition, an “Innovation Discovery Alley” opened, showcasing insurtech companies and Swiss Re solutions such as RDS and Fathom.

However, another date is likely to be more important for the scene itself: September 10, the deadline for applications to the Swiss InsurTech of the Year Award. This year’s event coincides with the association’s fifth anniversary and will be celebrated on December 1 with a jury composed, as Signoretti emphasized, of “highly experienced leaders in the insurance industry,” whose full roster will be announced in the coming days. Five trophies have already been ordered: one for the overall winner and four for the category awards. The fall program will be rounded out by a new event featuring Millennials4Boards on October 27 in Zurich. This reverse pitching format introduces potential board members and advisory board members to the insurtech companies, rather than the other way around.

Adnovum Joins as a Sponsor

Adnovum introduced itself for the first time as a new sponsorship partner of the SIH, with Dr. Christian Straube in attendance. The technology and consulting service provider, which specializes in digital resilience, positions itself at the intersection of the need for rapid adaptation and regulatory stability—and thus within what Straube termed the “transformation paradox,” in which insurers must implement changes quickly while remaining compliant. Adnovum’s motivation for the sponsorship partnership in this context: Insurtechs provide the innovation, while Adnovum ensures that insurers can adopt it securely and at scale. Initial discussions are already underway with various SIH insurtechs.

Straube’s presentation focused on a new offering: “AI-native software delivery.” Unlike current GenAI generators for application development, the Factory consists of four components that cover the entire development cycle—and thus not only delivers code but also translates clean requirements into auditable, maintainable, and extensible software that that meets regulatory requirements, either with a fixed outcome or on a pay-per-use basis. For insurtechs juggling customer growth and limited engineering resources, the model is designed to make capacity scalable in the short term without creating technical debt or compliance gaps.

Capitalwise: A Common Time for Capital

Akanksha Rais, founder and CEO of Capitalwise, addresses a problem she knows well from over 20 years of experience in the insurance industry: Reserving, capital planning, solvency analysis, and investment portfolio management are handled separately at most insurers, resulting in reports that take several weeks to produce and are already outdated by the time they reach the board. Capitalwise integrates these four areas onto a single platform, calculates available capital in real time, and enables stress test simulations that would otherwise take days. Partnerships with Parameta Solutions (TP ICAP) and VisGRC are designed to further feed real-time market data into insurers’ risk registers. The solution is explicitly intended to complement existing accounting systems such as SAP FSCM, not to compete with them.

Liabix: Using Physics to Combat Insurance Fraud

Things get significantly more technical with Liablix. The Italian insurtech company reconstructs car accidents in 3D using photos, combining artificial intelligence with a physics-based simulation it developed in-house—not by purchasing a game engine, but through proprietary technology that has evolved over more than 15 years. The system checks whether the damage, the sequence of events, and the injuries are consistent, and provides insurers with a standardized fraud risk score. The figures presented are remarkable: In the production database of existing customers, about 30 percent of cases are flagged as suspected fraud, with 15 to 20 percent confirmed as such—compared to just 2 percent detected by traditional methods. In cases where claims are partially denied or reduced, this results in savings of 40 to 80 percent of the claim amount. Liablix is already in active use in Italy, Germany, Spain, and Portugal, with the UK and the U.S. set to follow.

Briano: Insurance AI for Less Commonly Spoken Languages

Briano brings experience from building Georgia’s largest health tech company. The new company automates customer communication, document review, and claims processing in the health insurance sector using voice and chat agents. It consists of a claims pilot module and a quality assurance tool that analyzes customer conversations. The key feature lies in its linguistic specialization: Briano is specifically designed for “small languages” with fewer than 20 million speakers, for which large language models traditionally perform less effectively. With over ten corporate clients in Georgia, France, the Benelux countries, and Central Asia—including market leaders such as Tbilisi Insurance and GPI Holdings—Briano already covers more than 60 percent of its home market.

Crashwise: Accident Reporting Goes Digital

The final presentation was given by Crashwise, an Austrian insurtech company that emerged from over 20 years of in-house insurance experience. A traffic accident occurs in Europe every 0.8 seconds—that’s 40 million per year—and for fleet operators, each one results in an average of 600 euros in additional administrative costs due to missing photos, incomplete reports, or illegible information. Crashwise uses an AI agent to guide drivers through a structured, quality-assured documentation process directly at the scene of the accident, processes the data into a verified digital claim, and transfers an electronically signed claim file to fleet and insurance systems. Since its market launch in June, Crashwise has acquired its first paying customers, built a pipeline of over 1,000 fleet decision-makers, and collected letters of intent for more than 30,000 vehicles. After winning Austria’s largest startup competition, the company is now expanding into Germany and Switzerland and is seeking pilot partners among motor vehicle insurers.

A hub that’s growing

Four very different approaches—capital management, fraud detection, healthcare automation, and accident documentation—but one common thread: All four insurtech companies address the very point where insurers traditionally lose the most time—namely, the gap between an incident and reliable information. The fact that AdNovum, an established software service provider, is joining the hub at the same time fits right into the picture: If you want to keep up the pace of innovation, you apparently also need someone who can maintain that pace without losing control.

Binci Heeb

See also: Swiss InsurTech Hub Looks Back on an Eventful First Half of the Year

In April 2021, Asmir Imeri launched a simple yet ambitious idea: to bring the world of financial intermediaries closer to the world of mortgages. Five years later, this solo initiative has grown into an established company with a digital operating platform, its own training program, one of the largest teams of freelance mortgage specialists in Switzerland, and a lively birthday party.

After completing an apprenticeship as a drafting technician and serving in the military, Asmir Imeri entered the financial sector in 2007; his first experience with mortgage transactions followed in 2011. Drawing on this experience, he founded S.O.I. Strategic Opportunity Investment AG with the goal of providing independent brokers with structured access to partners in banking, insurance, and pension funds. In recent years, this has evolved, in the founder’s words “from ‘I’ to ‘WE’”, into a dynamic ecosystem with significant growth potential.

Operating system as the digital backbone

At the heart of the system is the Digital Mortgage Operating System (MOS). It enables independent brokers to process their clients’ new loan, refinancing, and specialty financing applications efficiently and in real time, while also providing access to a broad network of financing partners. Intelligent process automation significantly reduces the administrative burden in day-to-day advisory work.

In addition, the S.O.I. Special Financing division has established itself to handle more complex projects. It is aimed at high-net-worth clients, as well as real estate developers and general contractors, who wish to secure structured financing for complex construction and real estate projects from the conceptual phase through to completion.

Training as a second source of income

In addition to the Mortgage Operating System, S.O.I. is making targeted investments in professional development within the industry: Through the S.O.I. Learning World, the company provides hands-on training to finance and insurance experts, preparing them to become mortgage specialists with a recognized certification and a clear focus on practical application in day-to-day advisory work. This completes the cycle that Imeri had in mind from the very beginning: financial intermediaries, lending institutions, and end customers should all benefit equally from a functioning, sustainable cycle in mortgage financing.

Today, the company is led by an expanded board of directors that includes Asmir Imeri, Avni Izairi, Bruno Schweinzer, and Lirim Imeri. Five years after its founding, S.O.I. is no longer just the vision of a single individual, but a team that aims to help shape the next phase of growth in the Swiss mortgage brokerage industry.

Binci Heeb

See also: Learning for Real-World Application: The S.O.I. Learning World

Einstein demonstrated that time and space are not fixed quantities, but rather depend on perspective. In the latest episode of “Paul the Insurer,” podcast host Paul applies this principle to the insurance industry with a simple yet uncomfortable realization: value and risk are also relative.

A cracked cell phone screen is a nuisance for some people, but a minor disaster for others. A payout of 10,000 francs can be a matter of survival for a single parent, while for a wealthy client, the same amount is hardly worth mentioning. That is precisely the crux of the matter: Insurers think in numbers, while customers perceive things in context. Those who focus solely on the bottom line and ignore the significance of a claim for the individual may make correct decisions, but they are not relevant ones.

People are not Excel cells

Behavioral economics provides the foundation for this, something the episode only hints at, but which is worth spelling out in detail. People overestimate dramatic, rare risks, such as a plane crash or a cyberattack that makes headlines, and underestimate the mundane, common ones: a burst pipe, a bicycle theft, or a bicycle accident on the way to work. They avoid deductibles, even when they would be more cost-effective mathematically, because a loss feels worse than a gain of the same amount feels good. And they react more strongly to the way an offer is worded than to its actual content. For brokers and insurers, this means: Communication is not an afterthought to the product, it is part of the product.

Trust as the true value

The episode’s most powerful idea comes toward the end: A claim is never just a demand for money. It is a question: Will you be there for me? A decision can be factually correct and still be perceived as unfair if the process seems cold, bureaucratic, or impersonal. Personalization is therefore not just a nice bonus for marketing, but the practical consequence of the relativity of values: Anyone who understands that two identical claims carry completely different weight for two different people cannot handle them using identical processes.

Physics as a mirror, not a model

The comparison with Einstein is apt, but it has a limitation that the episode itself points out: Relativity in physics can be calculated precisely once you know the frame of reference. Relativity in insurance isn’t like that, because empathy can’t be reduced to a formula, no matter how much data science might want it to be. That’s exactly what makes the profession more complicated than any pricing model admits. In the end, as the episode’s closing line states, insurance is about people, not particles. A line that some algorithms would do well to hang behind their coffee machines.

Binci Heeb

Paul the Insurer has additional content that might interest you, such as a series of interviews with insurance industry executives.

See also: The Butterfly in the Cyber Portfolio

COMMENT

A good seven months after Yuval Noah Harari told the WEF audience in Davos that humanity is facing a second, invisible wave of immigration, one consisting not of boats but of algorithms, Saxony-Anhalt elected a party as the strongest force with 43.8 percent of the vote, a party whose platform essentially consists of warding off the first, visible wave. Two events, one weekend, seemingly two worlds. But a closer look reveals the same underlying problem. It certainly affects Switzerland as well and, as we are trying to show here, directly impacts the insurance and financial sectors.

An election in the state of Saxony-Anhalt is making headlines far beyond Germany’s borders. The AfD more than doubled its 2021 result and narrowly missed an absolute majority: 39 out of 83 seats, when 42 would have been needed. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution classifies the party as a confirmed far-right extremist group.

Anyone who wants to know why a party that openly uses the term “remigration” receives such widespread support will not find the answer in xenophobia alone. It can also be found in depopulated villages without a family doctor, without stores, without a functioning public sphere, and in a country that has left the question of who belongs and who decides open for years, rather than answering it.

Harari’s second wave of immigration

It is precisely this unanswered question that is at the heart of Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari’sspeech.

Hariri’s starting point: Artificial intelligence is not a tool, but an actor. It learns, makes decisions, and changes on its own; it masters language better than most humans; and, as he puts it, it can lie and manipulate, not because it is malicious, but because four billion years of evolution have shown that anything that wants to survive learns to do exactly that. From this, he derives his central thesis: Everything that consists of words—, law, literature, religion, and soon financial markets as well, will be taken over by the entity that masters words best. And that is increasingly machines.

His conclusion draws an analogy to the migration debate. The real wave of immigration in the coming years, says Harari, will not consist of people arriving in rubber boats or crossing borders at night, but of millions of AI systems that travel faster, write better, and are loyal not to their own country but to a corporation or a government in the U.S. or China. And he poses a single, uncomfortable question to leaders worldwide: Will they grant these AI entities the status of a legal person with the right to own property, to sue, and to express opinions? Those who do not make this decision today will no longer be able to make it in ten years. By then, someone else will have made it long ago.

The same disease, two symptoms

Saxony-Anhalt and Davos seem like opposites: here, a rejection of the foreign; there, a fear of machines. In fact, it’s the same diagnosis. In both cases, questions: Who belongs? Who is in the right? Who bears responsibility? that institutions should have resolved long ago have been put off for years. And a vacuum that the state fails to fill does not remain empty. In Saxony-Anhalt, it is filled by political parties that offer simple, radical answers to complex questions of distribution and identity. When it comes to AI governance, it is filled by U.S. corporations and their shareholders, who have long since stopped waiting to see whether Bern, Berlin, or Brussels will come up with an answer.

This is the governance thesis that runs through virtually every new technology and every unresolved issue of social distribution: structures of responsibility lag behind change, whether that change is technological or demographic, whether it involves language models or abandoned regions. Anyone who believes that one has nothing to do with the other underestimates how deeply both are rooted in the same source: the experience that decisions about one’s own future are made elsewhere, without one having been consulted.

What this means for decision-makers in the insurance and financial sectors

For risk managers, compliance officers, and insurers, this is more than just a political thought experiment. Anyone who uses AI systems today in underwriting, claims adjustment, or investment decisions is, in effect, already making preliminary decisions regarding Harari’s question: How much decision-making autonomy should a system be granted before a human reviews it? Who is liable if an autonomously operating model causes damage or makes a contractual decision that no one can fully understand in detail? These questions cannot be outsourced, neither to Brussels nor to one’s own IT department. Effective regulation, and this applies to AI governance just as much as it does to issues of social distribution, must actually reduce risks, be understandable and enforceable, and must not penalize those who follow the rules anyway while others circumvent them. Those who fail to apply this standard today are leaving the answer up to an election result or a shareholder resolution in another country down the line.

Harari’s final question to the Davos elite can be passed on, unchanged, to every Swiss executive suite: Those who fail to answer the difficult questions of belonging, control, and responsibility today, whether posed by humans or by AI machines, will find tomorrow that others have long since answered them. This week, Saxony-Anhalt was the human version of that answer. The machine version is still pending.

Binci Heeb

See also: People Are Still People: Even With AI Support

Scott Bessent missed his target in the bond market, and yields closed the week just under five percent; Christine Lagarde described her interest rate hike as a unanimous foregone conclusion while simultaneously raising her inflation forecast through 2028; and when the inflation figures were released on Friday, gold and Bitcoin fell in the very same minute to align with that forecast. The only competent trader of the week was the computer on my own desk, for the simple reason that it was the only one being watched.

From time to time, the market gives us a single moment that speaks louder than a whole year’s worth of commentary, and this week, that moment lasted about sixty seconds. Gold, which had been trading above $4,300 as a floor throughout the summer, fell by about sixty dollars within a minute as the inflation figures appeared on the screens; Bitcoin slipped below the 76,000 mark alongside it during that same window; over the course of the day, leveraged cryptocurrency positions worth several hundred million dollars were liquidated. Then both stabilized again. It wasn’t a crash, and I won’t portray it as such; it was something more revealing: the oldest store of value that people have agreed upon and the newest one they’ve invented showed exactly the same trend at the exact same moment. When the safest and riskiest things in the world move in unison, you’re not watching someone form an opinion. You’re watching a Margin Call. People don’t sell what they want to sell, but rather what they can sell—liquid assets—in order to raise the cash they need to hedge their uncovered positions. We described this very mechanism a few weeks ago in these pages when a biotech stock was sold off—not because anyone had had enough of vaccines, but because it was the only liquid asset that a loss-making trader could quickly convert into cash. Here it was again, except this time it involved both gold and Bitcoin, and a high core inflation rate along with a long-term bond yielding five percent were the triggers. A “pump and dump” doesn’t require a conspiracy. Cheap money automatically sets it in motion by luring the entire crowd into the same few trades, and then the price spikes, and the entire crowd rushes for the exit in the very same second.

The levers that no longer set the machine in motion

Compare this moment with what the men who are supposed to be in charge have been doing all week, because both are one and the same story, told from two opposing perspectives. Scott Bessent, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, spent the late summer pushing long-term interest rates back down by getting the government to buy its own long-term bonds on the open market. And that is precisely the tool the Federal Reserve used to call “quantitative easing” before the term fell out of favor. On Thursday, his operation purchased $5.19 billion worth of bonds, out of a $6 billion limit. Here’s the figure that’s more important than either of those: traders had offered him 10.5 billion. The market pushed more bonds on him than he was willing to take, and even then, he didn’t use up the entire allocation. If you compare its $5 billion to the $40 trillion the United States owes—and the more than $1 trillion a year it now spends just on debt service, a sum that is now larger than the entire defense budget—then the scale of the situation becomes clear. That’s no bazooka. It’s a blank, and the bond market heard the click. Even Stanley Druckenmiller, whom no one would call a hothead, has commented on it in the newspapers. The yield on 10-year bonds closed the week at 4.97 percent, just shy of five, and that on 30-year bonds at about 5.35 percent—according to some reports, the highest level since 2007— and this happened precisely during the week when the Treasury spent real money trying to steer them in the other direction.

There is a deeper irony behind this that is worth mentioning. Kevin Warsh, the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, was chosen in part because he opposes precisely this kind of intervention. He wants the central bank to withdraw from propping up the bond market and to gradually reduce its own bloated balance sheet—about $6.7 trillion. So just as the Fed is trying to step back from the driver’s seat, the Treasury is pushing its way in, and as it turns out, neither of them is holding a steering wheel connected to anything. That is what you need to understand about this moment, and it’s not about a single number on a single day. It’s about the fact that the men whose entire authority rests on moving the markets are pulling the familiar levers in full view of the public, and the machine is no longer responding. When the steering no longer responds to the steering wheel, the number on the gauge isn’t what matters. What matters is that the steering wheel has slipped from their hands.

The comeback was the same move, just in a better outfit

Take a look, too, at what actually rose on Friday. The stock market rebounded, with the S&P closing the week at just under 7,650 points. Over the course of five days, this represents a decline of just under one percent; on Friday alone, however, it was a gain of a good one percent. If you look more closely, the rally is just the same margin call in a fancier suit. Dell rose 12 percent thanks to Oracle’s cloud figures; hardware manufacturers posted strong gains because the expansion in the field of artificial intelligence is real and the orders are genuine; tellingly, Oracle itself ended the week in the red, and Nvidia slipped. The expansion is real. But a 10-year Treasury bond yielding 5 percent is simply the bill for it, and that bill is now arriving in the mail at the same time as the orders. A market that cheers capital expenditures while turning a blind eye to the cost of capital fails to weigh the pros and cons. Once again, it’s trading based on a single variable and calling it optimism.

An Interest Rate Hike in the Middle of the Chaos

And this is where the farce gets even more absurd, because the very same market that Bessent is currently forcing to accept cheaper money now expects the Fed to make money more expensive—as early as this week. The week began as a debate and ended as near certainty: Following Friday’s inflation figures, the futures market put the probability of an interest rate hike on Wednesday at about nine out of ten. So let me say what my column owes its readers, rather than hiding behind the meeting. The Federal Reserve will most likely raise interest rates on Wednesday. It will do so amid inflation over which it has little control, since the bulk of this inflation is gushing from an oil field—with the Gulf War keeping the price of crude oil at $100 and the price of diesel in the U.S. at a record high—and no interest rate has ever refined a barrel of oil. The price per barrel is making headlines; and the core data shows that the fire is already beginning to blaze from within: Prices excluding food and energy rose by three-tenths of a percent month-over-month, instead of the expected two-tenths, and the housing and services sectors continue to gain momentum. Warsh will use this half-truth as a pretext. The deeper truth, however, is that in the face of a supply shock, he would tighten monetary policy by using the only tool at his disposal against the one problem it cannot solve—and this in an economy that, aside from the boom in the data center sector, is faltering. Growth stands at just under one and a half percent; employment figures rose by only four-tenths of a percent over the entire past year; and the impressive figure of 162,000 in August comes in the context of a year in which the average was closer to 30,000 per month. A single good figure does not constitute a boom. Tightening the interest rate lever in this situation is not the action of a responsible pilot.

It is the action of a pilot who feels the controls losing their response and who pulls harder because pulling is the only thing left for him to do.

Politics only makes matters worse, and here, too, it would be better to name the man rather than the office. Six days before the final stretch leading up to the midterm elections, Donald Trump warns that the Fed had better not raise interest rates, even though his own Treasury Department is spending real money to push interest rates in the opposite direction. This contradiction is no coincidence; it is the whole problem, and I’ll come back to it below.

Europe, a passenger on this train

If you want to see where this path leads, you shouldn’t look to America, which, despite all its follies, is still at the helm of something, is still growing, and is still building the machinery for the next half-century. Look across the Atlantic, to the continent that long ago stopped piloting the plane and has resigned itself to being nothing more than a passenger on it. This week, the European Central Bank raised its own interest rate by a quarter of a point to two and a half percent, and Christine Lagarde described the decision as a unanimous foregone conclusion—on the very day that her own staff extended their inflation forecast all the way through 2028. Let that sink in. A central bank raised interest rates while, at the very same moment, admitting that it is likely to miss its target for years to come—which, in monetary terms, is tantamount to turning a steering wheel that the passengers have already been told is not connected to the rudder, and then calling the maneuver a matter of course. And yet the interest rate hike still had an impact domestically: The yield on ten-year German government bonds rose to three and a half percent, a seventeen-year high, meaning that passengers now have to pay more simply for sitting in their seats. The eurozone has no say in this matter, for it is bound by events beyond its control—above all, the narrow Strait of Hormuz, through which the oil it does not produce itself must flow, and to which I will return in a moment. On French highways, a liter of diesel reached three euros, and the government did what governments tend to do: it denounced the refineries’ profit margins, while remaining silent about the 65 percent of the pump price that consists of taxes—that is, its own margin. Meanwhile, the interest rate premium that France pays on loans compared to Germany has risen to around 90 basis points—in some cases higher than at any time since 2012—and no one bothered to put this on the front page.

A passenger can’t steer; all they can do is hold on. That is the current situation in Europe, and it is one reason why, on Friday, when the margin calls came, European investors also turned to cash and sold the gold and silver they had bought as a hedge—precisely because that hedge was what they could sell. The safe haven is turning into an ATM. The continent delivers the same disappointment time and again: it is a passenger on a train whose engineer has lost the brakes, and its greatest remaining strength lies in loudly and unanimously insisting that the acceleration is under control.

The trade I made just for fun

With everything that’s been going on this week, who actually managed to keep a cool head? I’ll tell you, and maybe you’ll find the answer just as strange as I do. I set up a small trading desk and staffed it exclusively with artificial intelligence agents, gave them capital, a mandate, and a strict risk limit—and watched them. They tracked price movements, adjusted their positions to the limit I had set, and closed out a losing trade without needing to be told twice and without sulking about it. It’s worth keeping in mind just how short this journey has been so far.

Four years ago, this technology could barely write a decent birthday message; this week, it wrote a book. It wasn’t scary; it was fast, and that speed deserves respect, because whatever these systems were capable of last year, they’re clearly doing even better this year. They will take jobs away from people, and anyone who claims otherwise is trying to sell something. But they did this under supervision. A human still had to set the boundaries, define the task, and be ready to intervene when the machines —which learned from the same data as everyone else—inevitably encroached on the same trading territory, which is exactly what people did this week with gold and Bitcoin, and for which they had to pay the same price.

Which brings me to the doomsday scenario that’s all the rage right now. A former researcher at one of the major labs warned this week that artificial intelligence, as he put it, has a realistic chance of wiping out humanity before the end of this decade. Perhaps that’s true; I’m not in a position to judge a prophecy. But look at what this particular week has actually shown. The machines on my desk didn’t lose any money they weren’t allowed to lose, because a human was keeping an eye on them. The intelligence that truly spiraled out of control this week wasn’t artificial at all. It was the Treasury Department, which, faced with forty trillion dollars in debt, fired a blank; the central bank, which raised interest rates contrary to its own forecast of failure; and the vast, sophisticated, thoroughly human crowd that leveraged itself into a single trade and had to be liquidated in a single afternoon. If you’re on the hunt for the intelligence that has spiraled out of control and threatens to destroy civilization, don’t waste your time watching the servers. Watch the committee. As always, he appears in a fine suit and, full of confidence, pulls a lever that has quietly slipped from his hand.

The week that will put them to the test

You won’t have to wait long to see the committee in action, because the coming week is almost tailor-made to test exactly that: whether someone with their hand on the lever can still get the machine to respond. It starts off quietly on Tuesday, with the Treasury back in the market—though for a small inflation-linked transaction rather than another duration play. Keep an eye on the coupons, though: If Bessent quietly starts buying the long end again midweek, don’t believe a word of the term “liquidity management.” A bigger shot at the same target that missed the mark on Thursday would be a second admission within two weeks—not a strategy. Then comes Wednesday, when the entire week is condensed into a single morning, as the Fed’s decision and U.S. retail sales figures are announced simultaneously. The base-case scenario is a quarter-point hike—the first since 2023—and by the close of trading on Friday, this had become almost a formality, with a nine-in-ten probability. No one should call this courage. This is the same chair who declared at Jackson Hole that monetary policy was not restrictive, and who is now belatedly reaching for the only remaining lever, while the inflation rate has risen by four-tenths within a month. This is a bill being paid, not a stroke of genius.

And the decision itself is only half the battle, because the press conference is where it all comes down to. If Warsh signals a single rate hike—and no further ones—indicating that he meant business and will now take a wait-and-see approach, the yield on the 10-year bond could fall from five percent, bringing some relief back to all markets. If he leaves October and December visibly open, the long end will remain under pressure and the noose will tighten another notch. This fork in the road—and not the quarter-point hike that everyone has already priced in—is what will actually move the money on Wednesday afternoon. Trump will shout, as he always has, and proclaim that the price of oil will plummet the moment the war is won; ignore the shouting and instead pay attention to whether the statement continues to pretend that the Treasury’s purchases and the Fed’s rate hikes are two separate measures—rather than a government simultaneously pulling on two opposite ends of the same lever.

The second figure shouldn’t get lost in the commotion either, because retail sales figures will be released that same morning, and a consumer staring at gas prices of four dollars serves as a counterbalance to the whole inflation narrative. If spending plummets and interest rates are raised anyway, the “soft landing” theory will die in the very same meeting in which it was conceived.

Later on, the contrast will only become even sharper. The Bank of England will most likely leave interest rates unchanged and issue a muted warning, which is nothing but noise. The Bank of Japan, which meets on the 17th and 18th, is expected to raise its interest rate to 1.25 percent—a level Japan hasn’t seen in more than thirty years—and it remains the only cog in the world that is still visibly bolted firmly to the machine; the yen has already carried out part of the tightening itself, and should Kazuo Ueda even hint at another rate hike before the end of the year, global conditions will tighten without the U.S. stock market ever having to admit it. It is a quiet irony of our time that the only steering column still attached belongs to the country that the West has held up as a cautionary tale for twenty years. And hovering over it all is the price of oil, which remains—no matter what the screens claim—the true measure of inflation. Friday’s two-dollar drop was triggered by a rumor of a meeting regarding the Strait of Hormuz—not a sign of peace—and it occurred on the very day the Houthis seized their island at Bab al-Mandeb at the southern end of the Red Sea. A diplomatic slip-up can lower the price of the barrel with the next delivery month by five dollars; a single tanker can drive it back up immediately. Anyone who bases their week on a single hopeful headline, while the price of diesel—at nearly six dollars—creeps into every price in the economy, reads a press release and calls it a forecast. If you set all the drama aside, the week boils down to a single question directed at the men who pull the strings: Can they show that the steering wheel is still attached to the wheels?

Under supervision

They won’t be able to prove it, and in the end, that’s all that matters—and it can be summed up in two words: under supervision. That’s the entire difference between a machine that traded rationally this week and a market that did not. The great gift of a decade of cheap money was that it eliminated oversight from everything in one fell swoop: from over-trading, which no longer had to be justified; from leveraged funds, which never had to meet a margin call; from the government, that took out loans as if they’d never have to be repaid, because money was free and there was always a buyer. The margin call, when it finally comes, is simply oversight arriving belatedly, all at once, and mercilessly—and it’s arriving now. The sober response to a week like this, therefore, is not to speculate on the meeting that the market has already all but decided for the Fed, but rather to become the overseer yourself while the securities are still being revalued: holding the real assets to which a paper claim always refers; to tailor your portfolio to the worst-case scenario of every question this week will raise—as if Warsh were to open the door and then refuse to close it behind him; as if Bessent’s next buyback were larger than the last and yet had no effect; as if a barrel price of $100 were a range you have to live with, and not an outlier you can simply wait out; and to assume, as a clear working principle, that no one is piloting the plane. Because this week, in Washington as in Frankfurt, and at that moment on Friday, that was exactly the reality. Take note, Planet Finance. The end of the world, if it ever comes, will not be heralded by a runaway algorithm and a glowing red eye. It will look exactly like this: familiar, well-dressed, thoroughly human, and absolutely certain that the controls are still connected.

Eric Lefebvre

See also: Bad News, Please

Pax celebrated its 150th anniversary at Aschenplatz with a cozy, informal gathering instead of a gala, a member of the cantonal government as a guest from the neighborhood, and a director from Avenir Suisse who turned the topic of retirement planning into a cabaret act.

“A Sofa Instead of a Gala”: That was the motto Pax CEO Peter Kappeler used to welcome his guests to the anniversary celebration at the company’s headquarters in Basel. At the center of the festivities was indeed a sofa: the iconic green piece, a symbol of what people know from home, which has been traveling across Switzerland since the beginning of the year, accompanied employees on a trip to Laax, and most recently was on display at the sales partner celebration at the Attisholzareal. Just in time for the “Open House,” it returned to Aschenplatz to offer the people of Basel an unusual living-room experience for three weeks, right where Pax has been at home for 150 years.

A Neighbor with a Historical Perspective

The fact that the head of the health department, of all people, delivered the laudatory speech is no coincidence, but rather a sign of good neighborly relations: State Councilor Dr. Lukas Engelberger, head of Basel’s Department of Health and president of the GDK, lives directly across from Pax in a property provided to him by – of all people – another insurance executive, Thomas Schönbächler, CEO of the Civil Servants’ Insurance Fund of the Canton of Zurich. Engelberger took the opportunity to delve into Basel’s city history: Malzgasse, where both the Department of Health and Pax have offices, owes its name to the “Malenzey,” the medieval leper colony to which the sick were once banished to the outskirts of the city out of fear of contagion. This stands in stark contrast to today’s approach, which treats the sick and the elderly with greater dignity.

Engelberger drew a simple division of labor from this: The canton ensures that people live as long and healthy a life as possible, while Pax provides the financial security for this: “All in all, it doesn’t work all that badly,” he remarked dryly. At the same time, he placed the anniversary in a political context: Pax was founded in 1876, shortly after the total revision of the Federal Constitution of 1874, which introduced direct democracy and the legislative referendum, while Basel-Stadt did not adapt its old patrician council system to the new federal reality until 1875. Engelberger saw the cooperative idea, whereby one is both owner and customer, as emblematic of what continues to shape the insurance industry in Basel to this day: an industry that has long been more significant to the economy than traditional banking.

The Zurich native who turned retirement planning into a cabaret stage

The humorous part of the evening was handled, of all people, by a Zurich native: Jürg Müller, director of the think tank Avenir Suisse, and, through his think tank, a funding partner of the very organization that had invited him, spoke humorously about the three-pillar system, a task he himself compared to asking an undertaker to “do something cheerful, but stay on topic.”

Müller began by citing statistics from the 1920s through the 1940s, which showed that at that time, one-third of Basel’s men and two-thirds of single women over the age of 65 were living on public assistance. The contrast with today: According to current figures, over 75 percent of retirees are satisfied or very satisfied with their financial situation, more so than the working population, only 60 percent of whom say the same. His analogy: Today, people sit in the shade of three trees, the second pillar, which emerged as a pension fund system as early as the 19th century; the AHV (Old Age and Survivors’ Insurance) established in 1948; and the three-pillar model enshrined in the constitution in 1972. It was only the order of the trees that politicians, in hindsight, adjusted to suit their purposes.

As entertaining as the retrospective was, Müller took a serious tone when discussing demographics: Since the turn of the millennium, life expectancy in Switzerland has increased by about two months each year, while the ratio of working people to AHV pensioners has fallen from six to one to just under three to one today, with a trend toward a further decline to 2.5. By 2040, the AHV faces the threat of an annual deficit of around three billion Swiss francs, while the most recent reform will generate just 600 million in additional revenue. His conclusion, citing countries such as Denmark (retirement age 68, expected to rise to 69 starting in 2035), Sweden (67), and Germany (65): There is no way around raising the retirement age. Just two additional years would restore the demographic balance of the 1970s. He calculated that this is certainly reasonable; after all, today’s twenty-year-olds work an average of only about 20 hours per week over their entire lifetime, half as much as a twenty-year-old in 1930.

Müller wrapped things up with a self-deprecating four-line Basler Schnitzelbangg poem in the Zurich dialect, a small gamble that he himself described as a calculated risk, but which was met with spontaneous applause.

Peter Kappeler thanked both speakers for combining warmth and humor in a topic that is often marked by bitter disputes in the Swiss pension debate, and then invited the guests to explore the “interactive exhibition” on Pax’s history within the building itself, including a game of foosball in the “red-and-blue time capsule” and the knowledge that FC Basel had fired its coach (Stephan Lichtsteiner) just under an hour earlier.

Binci Heeb

Pax is hosting its “Open House” through September 25

See also: Pax Donates Emergency Aid to Mark Its 150th Anniversary

On September 3, 2026, the Swiss InsurTech Hub, in collaboration with Swiss Re, hosted a conference at the company’s Zurich headquarters, the title of which could almost be read as an understatement: “Building Resilience.” What followed was a journey lasting several hours through flood models, polycrises, IoT sensors, and the question of why insurers are chronically too slow despite having capital, data, and technology. In the end, one sentence stuck with everyone—one that is likely to affect the entire industry: There is an action gap, and it is not getting any smaller.

To his credit, Jonathan Rake, CEO of Swiss Re Risk & Data Solutions, began his opening remarks not with a slide number but with a location: Glarus, 70 kilometers southeast of Zurich. In 1861, two-thirds of the city burned down there within a few hours—about 600 houses belonging to what was then a thriving textile industry. No single insurer could bear the loss alone. It was a systemic market failure from which Swiss Re emerged two years later, in 1863. Resilience, as Drake pointed out, was not a marketing gimmick, but the founding principle.

He distilled his opening remarks into three points. First: Historically, there has been too little investment in resilience—a shortcoming that is currently changing. He cited a figure from the Asian Development Bank from his time in Singapore: Of every ten dollars spent, only one went toward prevention, while nine went toward damage mitigation afterward. Second: There is “no better time for collaboration”—driven by advances in data and technology, but also by customers who no longer simply buy a product but want to actively help shape it. Third, and this is the very core of his presentation: the journey from “insights” to “decision intelligence.” A data insight that reaches the underwriter two days too late is worthless. His reference to the “black-box paradox” was particularly interesting: the more precise data becomes, the less transparent it often is as to where it comes from and why it was originally collected—thereby creating a systemic risk within the risk business itself.

The bill: $220 billion, half of which is insured

This was followed by a keynote address that presented some figures worth noting. Global economic losses from natural disasters totaled $220 billion in 2025, of which about $100 billion—just under 50 percent—was insured. The good news: This insurance coverage rate has never been higher. The bad news: It was still only 50 percent, and in emerging markets, it’s often below 5 percent. Also noteworthy: The insured losses in 2025 did not stem primarily from classic peak risks such as U.S. hurricanes, but rather from flash floods, flooding, and wildfires—hazards that traditionally were not the major cost drivers.

Switzerland itself served as an example: 40 days of heat exceeding 30 degrees in Zurich this summer, compared to a ten-year average of 10. Following the dry summer, the federal government announced 17.5 million Swiss francs for forest adaptation—a preventive measure—as well as 54 million in interest-free loans for farmers who were unable to sell their harvest as expected, a classic example of post-event financing. It is precisely this imbalance, the speaker said, that must be reversed. As a positive example, she cited a city in the southwestern U.S. that took out parametric extreme heat insurance, which triggers during unusually long heat waves without nighttime cooling and finances cooling measures, embedded directly in the city’s budget. A second example was the first deal to embed a natural catastrophe (Nat-Cat) risk transfer into a loan, in collaboration with the Inter-American Development Bank for the government of Belize. This approach is scalable because governments and companies already work with loans. You just have to channel resilience into the places where the money is already flowing.

Multiple Crises and the Question of Who Actually Benefits

In the subsequent panel discussion featuring Erika Gupta (Siemens Financial Services), Laurent Richème (AXA XL), and Christian Gobet (Swiss Re)—moderated by Coralie Ming (BCG)—one term stood out: “polycrisis.” Geopolitical tensions, cyber risks, climate change, and water scarcity are no longer isolated issues, but are intertwined and reinforce one another. Rechelle illustrated this using the example of the start of the war in Ukraine: supply chain disruptions, an energy crisis, inflation, potential shortages of agricultural goods, and—in his personal assessment—an increase in cyberattacks from Russia—all triggered by a single event.

The real point of the panel, however, was structural: Those who make investments in resilience are often not the same parties who benefit from them. A building owner invests in storm protection, but the economic benefits—fewer injuries, less government emergency aid—are realized elsewhere. Erika Gupta cited the example of a house on the Florida coast that was the only one left standing after a hurricane because it had been built well above the required building code standards. Economically, this investment could hardly be justified by the insurance premium alone. The actual benefit (no evacuation, no government-funded reconstruction) does not appear in any damage calculation. This is precisely where, according to the consensus, new business cases are needed—ones that highlight not only the reduction in premiums but also the overall economic benefits. The “Fortified Roof” programin Alabama was cited as a concrete example, in which the state directly provides grants for storm-resistant roofs.

Richème also made a remarkably candid statement about market realities: In a soft market with ample capacity, it is hardly worthwhile for insurers to differentiate between resilient and less resilient customers. Only in a hard market is resilience tangibly rewarded. A statement that contradicts many a sustainability brochure.

Flood models for the entire planet

In the fireside chat that followed, Bo Soevsoe Nielsen (RDS Corporates Swiss Re) and Andrew Smith from Fathom—the flood modeling company that is now part of Swiss Re—joined moderator Mitali Chatterjee. Smith, a self-proclaimed “One-trick pony“With a very clever twist,” he described the impetus behind his company’s founding: the 2011 floods in Thailand, an “unmodeled loss.” They simply hadn’t seen it coming, even though it would have been visible on their own screen as an industrial area underwater. Fathom builds physics-based models that—unlike generative AI, which Smith smugly referred to as “elaborate plagiarism”—can also simulate events that have never occurred before, worldwide and for any location.

Nielsen, for his part, soberly described the biggest blind spot of large corporations: the failure to acknowledge that they have blind spots at all. Reputational risks at individual locations, for example, could escalate into “stranded assets” if customers or suppliers pull out, turning what was originally a reputational problem into a balance sheet issue. Both agreed that visualizations—rather than abstract risk scores—are particularly effective: when you show corporate leadership what happens to a specific, critical facility, people in the room take notice.

Five Insurtech Companies, One Common Denominator

The afternoon was then dedicated to five InsurTechs, which presented their solutions in eight-minute intervals. Sas demonstrated how Swiss Re CatNet data is directly incorporated into underwriting decisions, from product configuration to automated client reporting. Previsico addressed a little-known gap: About 70 percent of all flood damage in the U.S. occurs outside FEMA’s official flood zones, due to rain-induced or near-water flooding for which there are no government warning systems. A case study involving the construction of a high-speed rail bridge in the United Kingdom illustrated the difference: Thanks to an early sensor warning, a construction site was evacuated in time, turning a potential loss of millions into zero damage.

Mitigrate Using the 2007 Gloucester flood as an example, he calculated how much investment could be saved by protecting the right buildings instead of the wrong ones: For the 12 percent of buildings with the highest preventable damage, 50 percent of the total damage could be prevented. For the wrong It takes 88 percent of the same investment to achieve the same effect—a difference of 300 million pounds. Onics A company from Scandinavia presented an IoT platform that uses sensors to detect water damage early on and offers insurers a white-label app for proactive customer communication, with the goal of improving the notoriously poor combined ratio in property insurance. Meteomatics Finally, a study from St. Gallen showed how weather simulations at a resolution of one kilometer (compared to eight kilometers in standard global models) can reduce damage verification costs by 50 percent.

The Action Gap

Finally, Dr. Christian Straube delivered the most analytically incisive presentation (Adnovum) in his synthesis. His thesis: The insurance industry was invented to manage uncertainty, but that is no longer enough because a new factor has entered the equation: speed. The world is changing faster than insurers can react, creating an “action gap.” His examples struck a chord: shadow AI in companies because governance processes are too slow; quantum computing, which clients like Roche and Mercedes-Benz have long been using in their supply chains, while insurers almost exclusively classify the topic as a cryptography risk; and autonomous vehicles, for which there is no “driver’s age” factor in actuarial models.

His solution to the “Action Gap” rests on three pillars: first, a radical focus on the user—people don’t think in terms of policies and claims, but in terms of life situations (no car, but an important appointment tomorrow—why not a shuttle bus instead of filing a claim?). Second, technology as a means to an end rather than an end in itself: No restaurant advertises that it uses “very good knives,” and insurers shouldn’t advertise AI, but rather the results it delivers. And third, standardization for integration: Systems that understand each other before building ecosystems. A nice aside: Machine learning only identifies patterns in the data it’s fed. If medical protocols have historically been developed primarily based on male bodies, the model is of little use for prescribing medication to a woman. This is a warning worth keeping in mind for any discussion of AI in the insurance industry.

A conclusion that should be taken seriously

What stood out that afternoon was not so much the sheer number of data points: flood models, IoT sensors, weather simulations at a kilometer resolution—but rather the consistency of a single message: Resilience is not a product to be sold, but an ecosystem to be built together, and data alone solves nothing if the decision comes too late. There are 165 years between Glarus 1861 and the Action Gap 2026. The question of whether an industry is acting quickly enough is clearly not one that can be answered with even more models.

Binci Heeb

See also: Swiss InsurTech Hub Looks Back on an Eventful First Half of the Year

Christian Bosshard, co-founder of MMG Management Consulting, is writing his dissertation on how generative AI boosts our performance, while our own expertise may lag behind. In a conversation with Jakob Barandun on the CapricornConnect podcast, he explains why this “decoupling effect” is becoming a problem right now for an entire generation of young professionals.

Christian Bosshard has been working at the intersection of business, IT, and operations for over 15 years. Together with his partners, he has built MMG Management Consulting from the ground up to a staff of about 30. In addition to his operational work, he is currently exploring a research question that extends far beyond his day-to-day business: What happens to our expertise when visible performance skyrockets thanks to AI, but our own learning process simultaneously withers away?

The Decoupling of Performance and Competence

The term Bosshard coined for this phenomenon is the “decoupling effect,” which refers to the disconnect between performance and the development of competencies. He illustrates this using his own professional history: When he received his first assignment 20 years ago as a new graduate—to conduct an analysis of e-banking users’ behavior—he had to painstakingly acquire knowledge, seek feedback, and repeat his attempts. A young employee given the same task today can produce a report within 20 minutes that already meets senior-level standards.

At first glance, it’s a success story. Studies show, however, that the learning effect comes under massive pressure—and in some cases, it disappears entirely. Bosshard also observes a dangerous conflation: Young professionals increasingly believe they understand a topic, even though it is actually the AI that provides the understanding, not them.

The Lost Sandbox

In the past, according to Bosshard, there was a kind of “sandbox” (a protected practice environment where one has to experiment, fail, and acquire knowledge on one’s own, without a ready-made solution from the start), in which one inevitably had to grapple with a specific domain in order to be able to deliver anything at all. Today, AI delivers results that even its users often can no longer understand in detail. If you ask how two AI-generated answers differ, an explanation is often lacking.

Yet it is precisely the combination of domain knowledge and the use of AI that creates real impact. Those starting their careers who never build the necessary subject-matter expertise will never be able to fully tap into AI’s potential, because they lack the foundation to build on the answers and contribute new insights.

Efficiency or Learning—A Daily Choice

Bosshard illustrates the dilemma using an everyday example: He writes an email, has it revised by AI, and usually gets a better version back. This leads to two paths. The path of efficiency means providing only keywords in the future, since the result will be good anyway. The path of learning involves analyzing what the AI did better and using that to improve one’s own writing. In a fast-paced work environment, Bosshard says, most young people opt for efficiency. That’s understandable, but risky in the long run.

New Tasks Instead of Fewer Tasks

Bosshard does not believe that young talent will therefore become redundant. Rather, he says, new career paths are needed. Traditional entry-level tasks, such as creating reports or PowerPoint presentations, are increasingly being phased out. Instead, younger employees should take on responsibility earlier, work more closely with customers, and tackle concrete problem-solving tasks together with experienced colleagues and AI—not alone, but as part of a team with supervisors and experts.

When critical thinking becomes a scarce commodity

Bosshard sees critical thinking itself as a key risk. Faced with a flood of information that is virtually impossible to verify, trust is increasingly shifting from traditional sources to AI, which is not infallible itself. This is precisely why it is so important for young people to develop their own expertise and critical thinking skills, and why businesses and society must work together to find ways to promote this.

His worst-case scenario: Companies deliberately choose not to invest in the next generation of talent because AI-generated results seem good enough anyway. The result, in three to five years, would be a depleted pipeline of experts and a growing dependence on AI whose accuracy no one can assess anymore. For Bosshard, this leads directly to the question of AI governance: Who is in charge—humans or AI—and to what extent?

Humanity as a Distinguishing Feature

When asked which jobs will disappear, Bosshard offers a nuanced answer: It’s not entire professions that will vanish, but rather clusters of tasks. Anything routine—standard reports, simple analyses, or presentations—can be automated. What remains—and is gaining in importance—are responsibility, creativity, context, expertise, and empathy. After years of digitizing and standardizing customer interactions, Bosshard sees humanity as a unique selling point for companies in the future.

In conclusion: Pause for a moment and keep an open mind

When asked about his dream superpower, Bosshard answers without hesitation: the ability to stop time in order to consciously create space for focus and reflection in the fast-paced world of AI—and to do so occasionally away from technology. His life motto sums up the essence of the conversation: You never stop learning, and you’re never too old to change your mind. Especially in an age of conflicting information and opinions, this openness is more important than ever.

Looking ahead, Bosshard is focusing on the positive: AI as a catalyst for creativity that makes it possible to bring ideas to life that simply lacked the time to be realized until now.

Binci Heeb

See, hear, and read more: “No Risk, No Fun”: How Zation Is Becoming a Global Player Without Investors, with Michael Altenberger, CEO of Zation

A regulatory clause, a viral post, a faulty sensor on a freighter somewhere in the Pacific, and suddenly an entire portfolio is in the red. The latest episode of “Paul the Insurer” explores chaos theory and poses an uncomfortable question: What if the industry has long been operating within a system that can no longer be explained using yesterday’s tools?

The effect is well known, usually as an image from biology class: A butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, and weeks later a tornado forms in Texas. What sounds like a nice metaphor is actually an uncomfortable description of how many modern risks actually work. The insurance industry, too, has its own “butterflies”: a minor change in the wording of a cyber insurance policy, a social media post about a denied claim that unexpectedly goes viral, a single faulty sensor on a cargo ship. Taken individually, these are minor details. But when combined, they can lead to losses that have no precedent in any historical dataset.

Historical patterns are no longer sufficient

This is precisely where the problem lies for actuarial models, which by their very nature rely on stability and repeatability. Emerging risks behave differently: they are nonlinear, unpredictable in their interconnections, and erratic in their dynamics. Five policies that, on paper, have nothing to do with one another can coalesce overnight into a single systemic exposure. What remains separate in a stable system can suddenly converge in a chaotic system: risk accumulation that can no longer be neatly mapped out in Excel spreadsheets but must be reimagined conceptually.

Humility instead of a fetish for forecasting

The industry’s response to this is less a new model than a new mindset: recognizing early warning signs, thoroughly simulating chain reactions, and remaining adaptable through modular policies and flexible reinsurance. That sounds pragmatic because it has to be. No one can prevent the butterfly’s wingbeat. But systems can be built to weather the resulting storm rather than be shattered by it.

Perhaps that is the real lesson of chaos theory for an industry that tends to rely on numbers, probabilities, and historical data: Not every wave can be predicted. What matters is the ability to respond with vigilance and agility to what defies prediction.

Binci Heeb

Paul the Insurer has more content that might interest you, such as a series of interviews with insurance industry executives.

See also: Insurance as a Heat Engine

This week, Wall Street reacted to a strong jobs report as if it were a disaster, only to rebound thanks to reassuring words from a “dove” and unchanged inflation figures—because the only thing it still cares about is the price of money. Meanwhile, the real economy—to which this money represents a claim—is quietly crumbling, from American diesel to European factory floors.

In every market, there is one sign that is more revealing than any forecast, and that is the moment when the crowd starts cheering for the wrong things. This week, they cheered, and then they panicked, and the order in which this happened gave the whole game away. On Thursday, a relatively low-ranking Federal Reserve official—one of its more cautious voices—said that, if it were up to him, he would leave interest rates unchanged this month. The market didn’t just react to this statement. It surged. The Nasdaq jumped more than one percent, the dollar weakened, and for a few happy hours, all was right with the world. Then, on Friday, the real news came: The United States had added 162,000 jobs in a single month—about three times as many as anyone had forecast. More Americans in work, more households with an income. And the market fell. If you read about these two days back-to-back, you’ll understand the current state of affairs better than from any strategist’s analysis. Good news has turned into bad news, and the reason for this is the only one that still makes any difference at all. It’s the cost of money.

The Market That Rants Against Labor

To see just how complete this reversal has become, compare the two trading days side by side.

On Thursday, a “dove” representative made a reassuring statement, and stock prices surged. On Friday, the economy showed positive signs, creating jobs, and stock prices fell, because a strong labor market is exactly what revives the case for an interest rate hike on September 16, and the probability of that happening promptly rose back to over sixty percent. Between those two days, the inflation rate hadn’t changed by even a decimal point; it stood at 3.8 percent, above the Fed’s target for the 61st consecutive month. Nothing had changed in the real world. What changed—and that was all that changed—were the expected cost of borrowing. A market in this state no longer weighs the nation’s prosperity, which it is actually supposed to assess. It is a single instrument tuned to a single frequency: the next decision on the price of money. And it has reached a truly strange point where it hopes that its own citizens will be a little worse off so that money remains a little cheaper. There is a word for an economy whose stock market tacitly works against employment, and it is not a flattering one.

It was never the economy’s fault

It’s worth clarifying what actually drove this, because a great many self-assured commentaries have latched onto the wrong cause. You’ll be told that bond yields have climbed to five percent—nearly reaching their highest level in almost two years—because the world has finally taken notice of U.S. debt, the war in the Gulf, or the budget deficit. But none of these things is new. The national debt surpassed the forty-trillion-dollar mark weeks ago and had been enormous long before that; the war has flared up and died down repeatedly for a year; the budget deficit has been a scandal for a decade. When the yield on ten-year bonds was still below four percent this past winter, each of these facts was already true. What has changed since then is more specific and revealing. Within a few months, market expectations have shifted from a Fed rate cut to a rate hike—perhaps even more than once—and this reversal alone accounts for the bulk of a percentage point in the ten-year bond yield. The rise in yields is not a judgment on the nation’s finances. It is a reassessment of a single variable—the expected course of a committee—which confirms rather than complicates the diagnosis. The only thing this market trades on, in both directions, is the price of money.

What a Lender Is Really Paid For

Let’s set the Fed aside for a moment, because the portion of the increase caused by the war is the only part that has nothing to do with the committee, and it’s worth examining it on its own. A bond yield, in layman’s terms, is simply the price of borrowing. It’s what a borrower must pay to convince someone to lend them money now, wait for repayment, and bear the risk that they might never get it back. When a war breaks out and this cost rises, the obvious reason—the one everyone immediately cites—is that the fighting drives up the price of oil, oil fuels inflation, and a lender who expects to be repaid in cheaper money reasonably demands more of it. But there is a second reason, one that is quieter and more revealing, and it concerns precisely what a lender is paid to take into account. He is paid to ask what the borrowed money is intended for.

In theory—and often enough in practice as well—a government takes out loans to build something. It takes out loans to build roads and railways, expand the power grid, extend the port, and fund research laboratories, and the very purpose of this debt is that it stimulates economic growth, so that the loan ultimately pays for itself. Such borrowing is not a burden but an investment, and a lender should charge very little for it. War debts are the exact opposite. They create nothing that would ever stimulate economic growth in the national economy that must service them. They fill the order books of the companies that manufacture weapons and—let’s be honest—the pockets of the men who award the contracts; then the money is spent and gone, and all that remains is the bill. A lender is right to charge more for money that he suspects will be squandered rather than invested. Not because the mountain of debt has suddenly grown, but because its nature has changed. That is the honest answer to the currently popular claim that the bond market has finally taken notice of the U.S. deficit. It hasn’t. What a rising war premium tacitly documents is not the size of the debt, but the emerging suspicion that the latest portion of it is being borrowed for the sole purpose of never being able to repay it.

And yet a careful analyst owes America a fairer judgment than its naysayers would allow, for the criticism leveled against it can be greatly exaggerated. Despite all its borrowing, the United States is still growing—more so than most of its competitors—and it continues to play a pioneering role. Artificial intelligence—regardless of the bubble surrounding it—chips, rockets, and the return to space—the driving forces of the next half-century—are being developed there and almost nowhere else. A country that is still inventing the future can bear a heavy debt burden, for the future itself is a kind of security, and America, despite its follies, has not stopped inventing it.

To be honest, the same cannot be said for the other side of the Atlantic. Europe has ended up with the unfortunate combination of debt and a lack of momentum. For the most part, it takes on debt not to build the next thing, but to cushion the comfort of the past, and it has neither the growth nor the industries of the future to repay the debt when it comes due. One might forgive a continent for a mountain of debt if it were using it to buy the future. All too often, however, Europe is merely renting its past.

Half the inflation that no one can vote on

That would be a tolerable way to run a casino if what everyone is trading were actually what matters. But it isn’t. While the screens fixate on whether money will cost a quarter-point more or less, inflation—which is actually accelerating—has reached a point where no committee can touch it.

The price of diesel in the U.S. has just hit an all-time high—nearly five dollars and sixty cents per gallon—and the margin that a refinery operator earns from converting crude oil into diesel has also set a record: more than one hundred dollars per barrel above the price of oil. Refineries are operating at 96 percent of capacity—that is, at full throttle—with no leeway to replenish inventories, even though September is supposed to be the month for doing just that.

None of this is a monetary policy event, and no interest rate has any influence on it. Diesel is what transports goods to stores and harvests from the fields; therefore, it translates—with a few weeks’ delay—into higher prices for almost everything and impacts a grain harvest that is already weakened by war and drought. That’s half of the inflation over which the Fed has no control—the half that shows up in barrels and bushels rather than in wages, and it’s the half that’s rising. And this is the trap the new chairman has fallen into. He is apparently preparing to make money more expensive to combat inflation pouring in from the oil fields—and he’s doing so in an economy that, behind the headlines about employment figures, isn’t actually that strong. If you set aside the construction boom in the field of artificial intelligence, U.S. growth stands at just under one and a half percent, with no net increase in employment over the past year and a real estate market that has been quietly dead for months. Tightening monetary policy in this situation to counter a price shock that tightening cannot resolve is not exactly a bold move. It’s the kind of step that draws applause in the boardroom but is regretted across the country for years to come.

And it won’t pass quickly, no matter what else they may tell us, because the forces driving it are structural rather than seasonal in nature. About eighty percent of agricultural shipments are transported using diesel; fertilizer, the other key input, was unaffordable for seven out of ten American crop farmers this year; and the national cattle herd has fallen to its lowest level in seventy-five years. This last figure is more significant than it appears, because a herd cannot be rebuilt overnight. It takes nearly four years for the decision to raise more cattle to result in meat on the shelves. In other words: Higher food prices are not a temporary spike that will reverse in the next quarter; they are set to persist for the next few years due to the sheer length of the cycles involved. This needs to be stated clearly, because we will soon be told the opposite. The same institutions that assured us the last wave of inflation was temporary—first and foremost the European Central Bank and its president—will assure us that this is the case this time as well. They were wrong back then—which cost us dearly for years—and nothing in the equation involving oil, fertilizers, and a shrinking cattle herd suggests that they will be right this time. Of course, they can keep adjusting the basket of goods and quietly swap steak for chicken and chicken for canned goods so that the published figures add up. What they cannot do, however, is reevaluate the actual shopping cart at the checkout. You can perhaps manipulate an index for a while. But you can’t lie to a household about the cost of its food indefinitely.

Meanwhile, a continent is quietly coming together

If you want to see what the real economy looks like once the flood of cheap money has truly subsided, don’t look to Wall Street, where people are still arguing about the water temperature. Look to Europe, where the tide has visibly receded. The official narrative there speaks of a slight recovery: Industrial production in the eurozone rose by one-tenth of a percent last month, and commentators have gratefully clung to that figure. If you look more closely—which almost no one does—the number falls apart. That one-tenth of a percent refers to a single month—the best of the last six—and the statisticians themselves have marked three of those six months as estimates rather than actual figures. If you narrow the figure down to manufacturing alone, it has fallen by a full one percent over the past six months; the stagnant overall figure exists only because the utilities sector—the mere costs of maintaining basic services—is quietly offsetting the shrinking production sector beneath it.

Behind this false sense of calm, the damage lies not in the rate of change but in capacity itself—and capacity does not return once a downturn turns around. Germany, the industrial heart of the continent, has cut 124,000 industrial jobs in a single year and now employs a quarter of a million fewer people in industry than before the last crisis. Nearly one-tenth of Europe’s total chemical production capacity is slated for permanent shutdown, with new investment in this sector having fallen by nearly ninety percent, because energy on this continent simply costs what it costs, and no amount of green ambition—no matter how grand—changes the bottom line for a chemical company competing with the American Gulf Coast. The currently popular consolation—that military buildup is quietly reindustrializing Europe—doesn’t hold up when compared with the numbers: German arms production has tripled and yet accounts for less than a quarter of a percent of Germany’s manufacturing sector—a rounding error disguised as a renaissance. And the deepest wound is the quietest of all. Germany now buys more capital goods—that is, machines that manufacture other machines—from China than it sells there. That was the one thing the German model could undeniably do better than any other in the world, and it has vanished—and no interest rate cut or tariff will bring it back. This is what an industrial recession looks like when it’s polite enough to hide behind a positive growth figure. A country or a continent can post a plus sign in the headlines, while the very thing that made it rich is gradually being shut down—one factory after another. I’ve compiled the complete, country-specific analysis—with sources cited for every figure and estimated data clearly marked—in a separate post for anyone who’d like to review the calculations. You can find it on my Substack.

A place of refuge isn’t always a source of comfort

Before I wrap up, a few words about the small country in the midst of all this, because its situation is more precarious than its reputation would suggest. When the world becomes frightening—and persistent inflation, a spreading war, and a neighboring country in industrial decline are arguably the most frightening combination the markets can face—money seeks refuge, and one of the oldest safe havens is the Swiss franc. That sounds like a clear blessing, and in business terms, it is: A strong franc makes imports cheaper, and Switzerland has kept its inflation low while much of the West has lost its bearings. But a safe haven exacts a price for this privilege. The very flight to the franc that keeps prices low in Switzerland is driving the franc higher, and a more expensive franc is hitting Swiss exporters at the worst possible moment—precisely when their biggest customer, European industry, is shutting down plant after plant. Thus, the National Bank is once again being pushed toward the decision it likes the least: to let the franc rise and watch its own manufacturers lose ground, or to sell francs to keep its value low, thereby printing precisely the money whose scarcity is the very reason for its preservation. Switzerland is in the process of importing the world’s unease through its own strength. It is flattering to be the space into which everyone is rushing. However, that is not the same as feeling comfortable there, and the coming months will make that difference clear. The track record of the past five years—against both the dollar and the euro—shows a currency that has done almost nothing but rise, with every new piece of bad news—most recently the war—giving it another boost.

What the money was intended for

So let’s put the two halves of the week side by side. In New York, the richest market in history flinched at the sight of its own population finding work and fainted at the whisper that money might remain cheap, because it had been trained to view the entire world through the narrow window of the next interest rate decision. In Europe, the very machinery of a prosperous economy is being quietly shut down, hidden behind a headline that has been gently rounded off to mean nothing. The two images are one and the same. They show what happens when a market—and the people who observe it—confuse the price of money with the value of things. Money is always merely a claim on real goods—on diesel, wheat, factories, and the know-how to operate them—and this year, that claim is being revalued hourly, while the goods themselves are becoming ever scarcer and, in Europe, are even disappearing altogether. A market that has learned to beg for bad news, to wish a little hardship upon its own citizens so that its loans remain cheap, has forgotten what money was ever meant for. The level-headed response to a week like this is not yet another forecast, for forecasts are cheap and there is already an abundance of them. It is a shift in perspective. Stop reading the market’s lips to find out its next word on the price of money, and start counting the things that money is merely a claim to: the barrels, the bushels, the plants that are still turning, and the hands that still tend them; for these retain their value when paper is revalued, and it is precisely these things that are becoming ever scarcer. The screens will continue to beg for weakness. The rest of us can go out and see what is actually being built and what is quietly being shut down.

Eric Lefebvre

See also: A Single Point of Weakness

The hailstorm on August 28, 2026, left a trail of destruction across large parts of the Mittelland. On Friday morning, a thunderstorm front swept across the densely populated regions of Aarau, Olten, Solothurn, Zurich, and parts of the Mittelland, bringing violent gusts of wind, heavy rain, and hailstones up to six centimeters in diameter. It left behind dented car bodies, shattered windows, damaged facades, building exteriors, and roofs stripped of their covering.

Now the full extent of the situation is becoming clear in more or less concrete figures and in practice, as the affected insurers grapple with the flood of claims.

Vaudoise expects over 2,000 claims and CHF 10 million in damages

According to a statement released on August 31, more than 650 damaged vehicles have already been reported to Vaudoise. Based on this initial data and given the intensity of the hailstorm, the insurer expects more than 2,000 claims in the coming days and damages totaling approximately CHF 10 million—exclusively for vehicle damage—in the regions of Aarau, Olten, Solothurn, and Zurich.

To handle the large number of claims, Vaudoise relies on mobile claims assessment teams that are set up as close as possible to the affected locations. “Proximity to our customers is our top priority. That’s why we set up our claims assessment centers as close as possible to the site of the weather event—and do so promptly—to ensure optimal organization,” says Gérard Nerny, head of the Auto Claims Assessment Department. Those affected can report their claim through their agency or on vaudoise.ch and will then receive a link to schedule an appointment.

AXA Relies on Hail Claims Drive-Ins and Scanners

Axa also reported a flood of damage claims across multiple channels as early as Friday evening and is advising its customers to file claims online whenever possible. Despite the additional staff deployed, longer wait times are expected on the 24-hour hotline. Customers with safety-related vehicle damage to windows should report it immediately; in such cases, Axa will refer them to partner garages, where wait times are also to be expected.

To speed up the assessment process, Axa is setting up temporary mobile hail “drive-ins” in the near future, initially planned for the Winterthur and Olten areas, and possibly at other locations as well, depending on the extent of the damage. There, hail dents will no longer be counted by hand but will be precisely recorded within a few minutes using a scanner, and the amount of damage will be calculated. According to Axa, it is still too early to provide a reliable estimate of the total damage.

In Practice: Insured Individuals Will Have to Wait Until Mid-January 2027

So much for the official announcements. However, the reality is quite different for those affected, as the editorial team atthebrokernews discovered: When scheduling an appointment for a vehicle damaged by hail, the earliest available dates were in mid-January 2027—about four and a half months after the damage occurred. From the policyholders’ perspective, this is not very customer-friendly, especially for vehicles whose safety or everyday usability has been compromised by hail damage.

Against this backdrop,thebrokernews submitted media inquiries to both AXA and Vaudoise to clarify how the announced measures will be implemented in practice and whether such long wait times are to be expected.

Vaudoise’s Responses

Our questions were answered as follows:

To quickly assess hail damage to vehicles, Vaudoise is setting up assessment centers. Vaudoise will inform its customers shortly about where and when it will set up these assessment centers in the coming weeks. Appointments can be scheduled online.

Customers bring their damaged vehicles to these centers. There, an auto expert uses a scanner to calculate the repair costs. Customers can then choose whether to receive a cash payment for the repair or have the damage repaired at a body shop.

If a windshield is shattered, policyholders don’t have to wait for an assessment: Customers can have their windshields repaired or replaced immediately, without a prior assessment. They can choose between the authorized service partners Carglass and Desa or a repair shop of their choice.

Vaudoise is thus making it clear that, at least for safety-related damage such as shattered windshields, there is no need for long wait times before an assessment is conducted. However, the exact timeline for locations and launch dates regarding the actual claims assessment by the assessment centers remains to be determined; Vaudoise states that it will provide customers with separate information shortly.

Axa’s Responses

AXA also responded to our media inquiry. The insurer is remaining tight-lipped about the number of reported claims: It stated that it had received numerous reports and that the scale of the damage was extraordinary, with a very large number of claims in a short period of time across large parts of the densely populated Swiss Plateau: in certain regions, hailstones reached a diameter of over five centimeters. Axa does not wish to provide specific figures regarding the storm.

The insurer is providing more specific details regarding the rollout of its hail damage drive-ins: Work on setting them up began immediately after the storm. A drive-in has been in operation in Hinwil since Tuesday; one will follow in the Olten area (Dulliken) starting September 9, in Winterthur starting September 10, in the Bülach area (Bachenbülach) starting September 15, and in the Weinfelden area not until October 27—about two months after the storm. Customers will be assigned a drive-in appointment by Axa after they report their claim.

The process itself is designed for efficiency: After making an appointment, customers drive their damaged vehicle into the drive-in, hand over the car keys, and spend a maximum of 30 minutes waiting in the customer lounge while enjoying coffee and croissants. Meanwhile, the vehicle passes through a hail scanner, whose 3D cameras create a digital model and record the number and size of dents for each component. A technician reviews and supplements the scan report, calculates the cost of the damage, and in the final consultation with the customer, the customer decides between having the vehicle repaired—either by scheduling an appointment at a partner garage or at their own garage—or receiving a cash payout, which is transferred a few days later. Customers receive the digital scan report via email.

In the case of safety-related damage, such as a broken windshield, Axa also immediately refers customers to partner garages, which are tasked with getting the vehicle back on the road as quickly as possible. However, the insurer acknowledges that, due to the high volume of claims, waiting times are to be expected even at partner garages and repair shops.

Context

With estimates of over 2,000 vehicle damage claims at Vaudoise alone and similarly high numbers of claims at other insurers such as Axa, Mobiliar, and Allianz Suisse, etc., it is becoming clear that the hailstorm of August 28, 2026, ranks among the most significant severe weather events of the year in the Swiss auto insurance sector. The measures announced—such as mobile claims assessment centers, hail drive-ins, and scanner technology—are intended to speed up the claims process, and the detailed procedure that Axa has now disclosed indeed reveals a well-thought-out process designed for speed.

But the rollout of these locations tells a different story than the advertising message: While Hinwil already got a drive-through location at the beginning of the week, those affected in the Weinfelden area will have to wait until the end of October—two months after the storm. And as for the regular damage assessment—excluding windshields—Vaudoise has yet to announce a timeline. Whether the announced measures will be effective across the board in practice or whether, as in this case, customers will have to wait for appointments well into next year remains to be seen in the coming weeks.thebrokernews will continue to follow this story.

Binci Heeb

See also: AXA Claims Statistics

A claim currently circulating suggests that cybercrime causes three times as much financial damage worldwide as all natural disasters combined.thebrokernews verified this figure and arrived at a clear—yet surprising—conclusion.

This claim regularly circulates in the media and at IT security conferences, though usually without citing a specific source. When searching for a media report, study, or institution that specifically cites this “three” figure, it becomes difficult: no such source could be identified. However, a 2023 documentary by the broadcaster arte states that “one in three Germans has been the victim of a successful cyberattack at some point” and that “researchers estimate that the annual damage caused by cyberattacks costs more than that caused by natural disasters.” And so, “one in three Germans” could translate into financial damage three times higher than that caused by natural disasters.

Where the comparison comes from

Cybercrime:

This figure is typically based on estimates from Cybersecurity Ventures, which suggests that cybercrime causes approximately $10.5 trillion in global damages and associated costs annually (with a projected increase to $12.2 trillion by 2031). This figure includes not only direct thefts or ransom payments, but also downtime, lost productivity, reputational damage, and forensic cleanup efforts. Cybersecurity Ventures itself merely states that the damage is “exponentially greater” than that caused by natural disasters. The source does not provide a specific multiplier figure.

Natural Disasters:

According to analyses by major reinsurers such as Swiss Re and Munich Re, total global losses from natural disasters amount to approximately 250 to 350 billion U.S. dollars in an average year. This figure is significantly more reliably substantiated than estimates of cybercrime, as it is based on observed loss data rather than projections. Swiss Re estimates total global economic losses (insured and uninsured losses combined) at $318 billion for 2024 and $220 billion for 2025. Munich Re puts the figures for the same years at $320 billion (2024) and $224 billion (2025), respectively.

The relation:

If we compare the $10.5 trillion to the $250 to $350 billion in damage caused by natural disasters, the calculated cyber damage would be many times higher than just three times that amount—more in the range of a factor of 30 to 40. The Swiss Cyber Security Days also cite a specific factor in this context: In an interview with Nicolas Mayencourt (CEO of Dreamlab Technologies), it is noted that natural disasters caused approximately $125 billion in damage in 2022, while cybercrime amounted to $5,000 billion. A cyberattack is thus forty times more costly than a natural disaster.

It should be noted, however, that the same expert cited a different figure at a later press conference during the Swiss Cyber Security Days (early 2025): There, he mentioned eight trillion Swiss francs in cyber damage worldwide per year, twenty times more than all natural disasters combined. The multipliers cited thus vary considerably even within the same source and conference series. This is further evidence that these are model estimates and not established facts.

The “3x” claim -if it refers to these orders of magnitude at all – is thus far below what even the cyber industry’s own model calculations yield.

Why the comparison doesn’t hold up

Comparing apples and oranges:

These two sets of figures are therefore hardly comparable from a methodological standpoint. Experts also criticize the projections on cybercrime, noting that they are difficult to verify because, for example, Cybersecurity Ventures does not disclose the methodology on which they are based.

More Realistic Cyber Statistics:

More conservative think tanks and economists such as the CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies), which, in collaboration with McAfee, most recently estimated the global cost of cybercrime at around 600 billion U.S. dollars, or more conservative projections by industry media based on that figure tend to estimate the actually measurable global damages caused by cybercrime at between 1.2 and 1.5 trillion U.S. dollars per year. Based on this more conservative estimate, the gap between this figure and the $250 to $350 billion in damage caused by natural disasters would narrow to a factor of about 4 to 6, bringing it closer to the commonly cited “3x” claim, though it still does not match it exactly.

For the DACH region, Bitkom’s “Economic Security” studies provide more specific, annually collected figures: The total damage caused by theft, espionage, and sabotage in Germany amounted to 266.6 billion euros in 2024, of which 178.6 billion euros was attributable to cybercrime. According to Bitkom, 2025 will even see a new record high of approximately 289.2 billion euros per year; see also the press release from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution announcing the study.

The risk assessments conducted by companies themselves are also well-documented. Here, the trend is now even more evident than it was in 2024: In the current Allianz Risk Barometer 2026 For the fifth consecutive year, cyber incidents are the world’s biggest corporate risk, with the highest recorded percentage to date, 42 percent of responses, and a lead of ten percentage points over the second-ranked risk. Natural disasters have slipped to fifth place in the same ranking, partly due to a calmer hurricane season in 2025. As early as Allianz Risk Barometer 2024 For the third consecutive year, and for the first time by a significant margin, cyber incidents were the top global risk, while natural disasters rose from sixth place to third. The “third consecutive series” mentioned in the 2024 report is likely the actual source of the “3” association in the circulating claim, but it refers to a series of rankings spanning several years, not to a specific risk factor. With the updated 2026 figure (fifth consecutive series), this reference is now obsolete anyway.

Situation in Switzerland

In Switzerland, these trends are reflected on a smaller scale: Damage from severe weather—such as floods or mudslides causes hundreds of millions of francs in property damage each year. At the same time, according to the Federal Office for Cybersecurity (BACS) and Swiss Crime Prevention, ransomware incidents and online fraud have become one of the greatest risks for SMEs and government agencies, as system outages and extortion can result in massive economic losses in some cases. However, a reliable, directly comparable total figure for cybercrime-related losses in Switzerland—which would allow for a comparative analysis with natural disaster damage is not yet available.

On August 26, a massive glacier collapse triggered a devastating flash flood in Nepal and Tibet, leaving at least 270 people dead and more than 1,300 missing; a massive flash flood in the Himalayas swept away many people and entire villages. Among them are hundreds of missing tourists.

Don’t forget to fact-check

The claim that cybercrime causes three times more damage than all natural disasters combined could not be confirmed in any study or media report found using this exact wording. It appears to be based on a common but imprecise conflation of two things: a model estimate from the IT security industry (10.5 trillion U.S. dollars, Cybersecurity Ventures) and a ranking from the Allianz Risk Barometer, which has classified cybercrime as the top risk for the third consecutive year. Depending on which cybercrime estimate is used, the resulting multiplier is either significantly higher (30 to 40, based on the Cybersecurity Ventures figures) or significantly more moderate (4 to 6, based on the more conservative CSIS estimates). Neither data set supports a clean factor of three. The statement thus primarily reflects model assumptions and not a direct comparison of property damage measured using equivalent methods.

Binci Heeb

See also: Cyber Threats Remain the Top Risk for Businesses