Are We Ready for the Financial Hurricane?

This article was originally published by the Lever, an investigative newsroom. If you like this story, sign up for the Lever‘s free newsletter.

As Hurricane Milton barreled toward Florida last week, Billy Cox eyed the sky, talked to his neighbors, and decided to stay put. 

He figured his home in Sarasota was on high ground, on a former cattle ranch just outside of mandatory evacuation orders. As the gathering storm slid east across the Gulf of Mexico, nearing the physical limit of how much heat could transfer into energy, his daughter Savannah texted late into the night, trying to convince him to “get the hell out of there,” he said.

Savannah Cox, who researches the role of financial systems in climate governance at the University of Sheffield in England, was worried not only for her family’s safety, but the consequences of yet another major hurricane hitting the state. “We’re facing futures that are radically unlike the past,” she said, whether or not people like her father are prepared to leave their homes.

As thunderstorms circled the hurricane’s eye like a tightening fist, a friend told Billy to write his name on his arm in permanent marker, so his body could be identified. He ignored this instruction, too. “That’s capitulation,” he joked. “I refuse to yield.”

As the climate crisis intensifies, stronger storms are killing more people and costing far more in damage. Just two weeks after the last major hurricane, search crews were still digging into mud to find the bodies of missing family members in North Carolina when scientists reported that cyclones are up to 50 percent wetter than they used to be. Along with Hurricane Helene, 20 other billion-dollar disasters have hit the United States this year. 

Even as it gets easier to quantify exactly how much worse our new normal might be, the global financial system hasn’t caught up. The threats to a bungalow on one of Florida’s barrier islands might now be painfully obvious. But as the insurance industry collapses, these individual risks have been collecting upstream, accumulating quietly in mortgage portfolios and downgrades of credit and bond ratings. 

Across the country, everyone will be paying for the recent hurricanes through their utility bills and insurance premiums and stalled consumer supply chains, while their retirement accounts are threatened and regional banks falter and bond markets fall. This daunting collection of national liabilities makes it more expensive to rebuild after disasters and harder to make necessary adaptations. Like the 2008 subprime crisis, these overlooked risks could set the stage for the next financial disaster. 

As climate adaptation becomes more urgent, financial spirals are also driving its costs higher. Where people can’t afford insurance, it’s harder to sell homes, decreasing their values. This destroys property tax revenue at the same time that governments need to write bonds to rebuild after storms. A shrinking tax base can lead to ratings downgrades, making it cost more to borrow the same amount of money for something like a sea wall. 

Writ large, this dynamic may lead creditors to preemptively pull back from impacted regions, posing credit and market risks to banks and pension plans — magnifying the impacts of climate disasters. 

It’s hard to overstate how sprawling this problem might become, or how quickly it might escalate. In 2021, the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a federal government organization established to monitor U.S. markets after the 2008 financial crisis, wrote, “Climate change is an emerging threat to the financial stability of the United States.” In short, we are not prepared for the global change that is already guaranteed.

The fossil fuel industry clearly foresaw these financial foibles: A Shell report from 1989 found that as global warming progressed, “civilization could prove a fragile thing.” As they predicted, 35 years later, the temperature of the Earth’s land and oceans has hit an all-time high. 

Many of the planet’s vital systems are careening toward tipping points, like the collapse of Greenland’s ice sheets, which may lock in abrupt or irreversible changes. In this newly unpredictable phase, “more and more scientists have begun to research the possibility of societal collapse,” wrote the authors of a recent global assessment. 

By the time financial regulators recognize what’s actually at stake — much like those who finally decided to leave in the last hours before Hurricane Milton hit, only to find all options booked or sold out — it might already be too late. 

‘Possibility of societal collapse’

In the spring of 2023, Emily West sat down in her Boston University School of Law classroom for a seminar on climate risk and financial institutions. Her professor, Madison Condon, displayed a slide from a Nature Climate Change paper. It mapped how American properties may be overvalued by as much as $237 billion, because their flood risks weren’t fully counted. 

Looking at the map, West was shocked. Her hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, jumped out in red. She had grown up hearing stories about her relatives surviving a devastating 1916 flood, including a family member who swam through the waters to safety as houses and railroad lines washed away. For her final class paper, titled “If the Good Lord’s Willing and the Creek Don’t Rise,” West decided to explore the community’s development in the 100-year flood plain. 

What West found was chilling. A popular tourist destination, Asheville’s recent growth had vastly increased its vulnerability to flooding, at the same time that a housing shortage drove up prices — to the point that West and many of her friends could no longer afford to live there. “When you need a place to live, and you want a home, you’re going to take more risks,” she said. 

Jesse Gourevitch, the Nature Climate Change paper’s lead author, said that nationally, there are now perverse incentives for developing in these kinds of high-risk areas. The problem, he said, is driven by a lack of access to transparent, property-level information. “Those prices could readjust in a sudden and chaotic way that could bring instability to the housing market,” he said. Many places where homes are overvalued and underinsured are also heavily reliant on property taxes — so when a hurricane hits, local and state finances might also be upended.

Asheville had taken steps to improve its resilience to flooding, investing millions in developing the low-lying River Arts District. The effort helped residents qualify for discounts through the federal flood insurance program. But interviewing longtime locals about past disasters, West realized that “when the next 100-year flood came, a lot of these places were going to be wiped away.” 

This grim forecast was on West’s mind in September, when Hurricane Helene brought cataclysmic flooding to her hometown. Watching the water rise as she had predicted was like a “Black Mirror” episode she couldn’t turn off. For two days, West couldn’t reach her parents. Until their service was restored, she didn’t know if they had survived. 

“It’s so crazy to me that it actually happened,” she said. Helene’s destruction proved even worse than she had imagined. “So very many people lost their homes and lives in the flood, because they were never given the opportunity or warning to evacuate.”

Less than 1 percent of Asheville’s Buncombe County had flood insurance, which is typically sold separately from homeowners’ policies. Many weren’t considered high risk by the federal flood program, which mortgage lenders use to decide where to require flood coverage. Despite recent efforts to update government flooding maps, many are badly outdated; in recent years, the National Flood Insurance Program has paid out far more in damage claims outside of its designated high-risk zones than in them. As a result, the vast majority of Helene’s potentially $250 billion in damages won’t be covered by insurance. 

Financial pressures can trap homeowners in a vicious cycle: “You may be very aware of your exposure to flood risk, you may be struggling to make insurance payments,” Gourevitch said. But in places like North Carolina, having a bad credit score makes premiums more expensive, pushing insurance out of reach. Without insurance, the probability of homeowners defaulting on their mortgage after disasters becomes more likely, said Ishita Sen, an assistant professor of finance at Harvard Business School. 

Typically, when a homeowner wants to borrow money to buy a house, they go to a bank. After the bank issues the loan, it sells it to government-sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, often pooling multiple loans together. These big corporations then package the loans into mortgage-backed securities they sell to investors. In theory, this provides important liquidity for the housing market, freeing up more capital for lenders and guaranteeing mortgage payments for investors. But for the system to work, the actual houses have to stay dry and standing — which is why mortgages require insurance. 

But insurance only provides protection if the company can actually pay its claims. As traditional insurers have raised rates or pulled out of states altogether, newer, lower-quality companies are entering the market. They service some of the riskiest properties but tend to hold less capital, Sen explains, and regulators aren’t keeping close enough track of them.

Fannie and Freddie rely on external rating agencies to assess insurers’ stability. They have different requirements for newer rating agencies, such as Ohio-based Demotech. Demotech’s rating market has grown rapidly in hurricane-prone areas like Florida, where it now rates 50 percent of the state’s insurance policies. Because Demotech works primarily with small insurers that provide important coverage in disaster-prone regions, government-sponsored entities have agreed to less-strict rating requirements. Sen’s research finds these same insurers would not pass muster if subjected to traditional rating agencies’ methods.

And sure enough, 20 percent of companies Demotech rated in Florida have recently become insolvent. When insurers fail, their financial burden falls onto state guaranty funds or federal programs, like disaster relief. The erosion of this system allows lenders writing the riskiest mortgages to pass their liability on to taxpayers. In June, Sen told the Senate Budget Committee this lack of regulation is “a transfer of risks from the state of Florida to the rest of the country.”

The committee’s chairman, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said the warning signs are flashing red. “We’d be fools not to take heed,” he said in a statement to the Lever, “and set our country on a safe pathway to greater economic stability while there’s still a path to take.”

Government-sponsored enterprises appear to agree that they don’t have a good sense of their liabilities: In 2022, Fannie Mae’s climate risk officer wrote to the Federal Emergency Management Authority, saying, “The market is hampered by the lack of a standard metric or set of metrics to understand the risks associated with natural disasters.”

This vast unpriced risk accumulating in the mortgage market concerns experts like Condon, West’s law school professor. 

“You’d think that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would have someone checking to see whether their mortgage will be paid, or whether that house will be literally underwater,” Condon said. Shockingly, “they don’t really have that infrastructure right now.” (Both entities declined repeated requests for comment.) 

Sen thinks the chance of a 2008-style collapse caused by climate change is “relatively low.” Still, when too many hurricanes happen at the same time, or affect too large a swath of the country, she agrees the “dynamic is going to be very challenging.” 

As Milton drew closer to landfall, just how big of a hurricane — or how many hurricanes in a row — it would take to knock the global financial security market to its knees remained an open question. 

Even when investments themselves aren’t directly impacted by extreme weather, they may be affected because the insurers holding them are exposed. If insurers face large payouts due to climate events, they may sell their holdings in bulk. This kind of sell-off can disrupt pricing even for safer bonds, as happened during the pandemic. 

“We’re really not paying attention to this huge looming physical risk,” Condon said. “That we’re not starting to talk about macroeconomic-scale damage is just silly.” 

Picking climate winners and losers

Back in Sarasota, Billy Cox sat on his back porch with a beer, ready “to watch the show.” The clouds scudded in, low and ragged. The wind gathered and the oak trees bent to ruin. The branches hissed as they snapped in the dusk, he said, “almost like they were relishing this moment to get back at mankind.” Pink lightning slashed across the sky. 

On satellite radar, a ball of birds and insects 55 miles wide formed inside Milton’s eye, unable to fly out of its calm, while meteorologists battled online accusations that the government was controlling the weather. Doomscrolling from England, his daughter Savannah knew that the state was particularly unprepared. 

Florida has no income tax, she explains, meaning a significant amount of its tax base comes from property taxes. If those go down, there’s less revenue, which makes it harder to provide services and pay outstanding debts. 

“To understand the heart of this really maladaptive cycle, you need to go to Miami,” Savannah said. She spent several years along the region’s turquoise waterways, interviewing residents like Bob Kunst, a 78-year-old fighting the City of Miami Beach over a project intended to channel stormwater away from his neighborhood. The city claimed its pipes increased the area’s resilience to sea-level rise, though opponents argued they actually harmed the bay’s natural defenses by degrading local ecosystems that would have otherwise absorbed storm surges. 

Kunst suspected what he called “worthless” infrastructure was less about controlling storm surges and more about the city’s credit ratings. In fact, in a 2019 letter, the mayor of Miami Beach explicitly said that such projects were why the city had maintained strong credit. To build infrastructure, cities like Miami often ask investors for money, promising to repay them in the form of steady interest payments, often with tax advantages. High credit ratings indicate these loans are lower risk and allow cities to borrow at lower interest rates.

As Savannah dug in, she found that rather than relying on clear, evidence-based measures, both rating agencies and government officials hoping for their favor are just guessing about what might actually protect vulnerable residents and local economies. 

In 2017, Moody’s Investors Service, which provides credit ratings for governments, announced that it would start considering climate resilience in its analysis. But the firm said it would only consider short-term shocks like flooding and not long-term trends like sea-level rise, whose effects are more difficult to observe on metrics like tax revenue. This approach can provide false confidence, Savannah said, ranking certain hazards such as wildfires as more threatening than sea-level rise. Moody’s was not able to respond before publication. 

It’s also unclear exactly what types of mitigation projects cities will be rewarded for. As one risk management officer told Savannah, “Rating agencies like Moody’s really hold the key to our futures. … The problem is that we really just don’t know how they’re thinking about resilience.” 

She found that one thing Moody’s analysts do look at is how cities handled past events, even though storm frequency might radically change in the future. That helps wealthy locations like Miami retain comparatively high ratings despite significant risks, while poor places like New Orleans get downgraded. This practice makes it harder to accurately price climate risk.

City planners trying to buy time for their communities need more than just transparency, Savannah said. “They need a different geology, they need a different, less property-driven economy.”

Even worse, only 7.5 percent of municipal debt is insured, meaning when disaster strikes, cities themselves may default. 

After Paradise, California, burned to the ground in 2018, for example, the city struggled to repay its bonds. Paradise received a $219 million settlement from the utility PG&E Corp after their equipment was found to have started the Camp Fire, but rather than repaying its debts, the city earmarked those funds for reconstruction. In response, rating agencies slashed the city’s ratings into junk territory, increasing their borrowing costs and limiting their potential investors. 

Paradise is “now shut out of the bond market,” Savannah said, “unable to access capital markets in the future.” That means the city will likely be forced to rely on federal or state aid for any future recovery efforts.

FEMA won’t be able to respond to every catastrophe indefinitely; the disaster relief program ran out of funds in mid-September, forcing Congress to borrow from the 2025 budget to meet immediate recovery needs. To respond to the back-to-back disasters since, the agency has spent $9 billion, or about half of its total funding for the next year. 

These shortfalls will very soon get worse: The Small Business Administration, which provides low-interest loans to disaster survivors, ran out of money for loans to hurricane victims on Tuesday. Ultimately, “the federal government is going to pick climate winners and losers,” Savannah said.

As these budget gaps mount, Condon said the federal government needs to ask larger questions about the recovery process. 

“No one wants to talk about managed retreat,” she said. “The thing is if we don’t, we’re going to have unmanaged retreat.” Beyond the hundreds of thousands of homes that Helene destroyed, for example, two major interstate highways between Tennessee and North Carolina will probably be closed for months, while hundreds of electrical substations flooded. The North Carolina-based utility Duke Energy warned that in many places, “we are going to have to completely rebuild” — and the costs of doing so will probably be passed on to consumers through rate increases in the six states they serve. 

Without a national climate adaptation plan, there are no federal standards requiring utilities or transportation departments to consider future climate risks as they rebuild. Auditors might flag utilities’ liability for wildfires, warning they might need federal bailouts, as Warren Buffett recently wrote in the Financial Times, but regulatory agencies have not developed clear guidelines on how to incorporate physical risk. 

“There’s still no coordinated conversation about where it’s even worth rebuilding, or are we going to run out of money,” Condon said.

Though a Government Accountability Office report recently called for a pilot program on climate migration, it’s not as simple as saying people with risky properties should just move. Savannah only has to look as far as her own family to see that. She has family, friends and colleagues for whom the stress of responding to first Helene and then Milton has been overwhelming. “It’s a ticket to an early grave,” she fears. 

For the first time, some of her family is considering leaving Florida, she said. But as Milton’s winds finally waned and her relatives started to assess the damage, they’re not sure if they can sell or where they could afford to move. 

She said, that like many Americans, they’re now realizing “the things that we tend to take for granted — our homes, our roads, our cities — can just sort of be taken away.”

When development looks like retreat

The morning after Milton, Sarasota seemed hollowed and bright. “It was like the first breath of autumn,” Billy Cox said, “like Octobers in Florida used to feel 40 years ago. It felt nostalgic.” He wandered out onto the abandoned streets, the unnatural quiet broken by distant generators and the thud and burr of chain saws. 

Like the economist who shares its name, Milton may unintentionally demonstrate how the limits of the free market end up socializing risks. While his daughter was conducting research, Billy visited her in Miami; driving over the bridge into the city, he was stunned by the oblivious new development, the horizon filled with scaffolding and cranes. 

In May, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis passed a law erasing references to climate change from state law. With the limestone beneath the city acting like a sponge, “no amount of sea wall is going to stop anything from flooding there,” Billy scoffed. In spite of all the new construction, he asked his daughter at what point smart money would start to panic and leave the state. “It’s already starting,” she told him. 

That was before Milton caused an estimated $50 billion of insured losses. 

Even before hurricane season, the state’s housing market seemed to be hitting a tipping point: In August, the number of available houses jumped up 50 percent compared to August 2023. The slowdown has prompted institutional investors to sell, too, as managers look to dump properties that have started to look like liabilities. 

Amid this reckoning, accurate data about future perils is becoming increasingly valuable. In 2019, for example, Moody’s purchased Four Twenty Seven, Inc., a climate data and risk analysis firm. Meanwhile, First Street, a leader of the climate modeling industry, announced a partnership with online real estate giant Zillow in September. Previously a nonprofit, First Street raised $46 million in funding this year as it transitioned into a public-benefit corporation.

As more governments and ratings agencies realize they need to know what climate might cost them, information about how risk assessments are made is often scarce. “We just don’t really know how scientifically robust a lot of these models are,” Savannah said. Last year, scientific experts told the White House that though these estimates affect the national economy and millions of people, they could be “of questionable quality.” 

Nor do these black-box algorithms always agree with each other: This summer, scientists at University of California at Irvine created their own model of flooding risk from rain and rivers in Los Angeles and compared it to First Street’s national flood maps. The two came to opposite conclusions about which neighborhoods were at high risk, differences researchers warned could “radically reshape assessment” of where cities prioritize mitigation projects.

Such discrepancies are coming to light just as financial institutions are starting to grasp how specific climate risks could impact their portfolios. First Street, which works with over 20 government agencies, as well as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and half of the country’s banks, recently published a report on regional banks’ climate vulnerabilities. The firm found even a small number of risky loans could result in a 280 percent increase in net losses. In the resulting report, Jeremy Porter, First Street’s head of climate implications, explained that while every state saw a billion-dollar disaster in 2021 and 2022, it’s not just headline-making calamities that are increasing, but also localized events, like hail storms or sunny-day flooding.

Because small community banks tend to be geographically concentrated, they’re more likely to have investments that might all be affected by a single hazard. In First Street’s modeling, many small institutions crossed the government’s materiality threshold limit, a complex metric that measures financial stability. In total, the banks at risk hold about 11 percent of all outstanding loans. 

Unlike large banks, smaller banks can’t simply pull out of risky markets; their capital is typically invested close to home. Many are also regulated by state banking authorities, not federal ones, meaning individual states will need to take action to apply climate-related regulations. 

Even major central banks have overlooked physical risks until recently, Condon said. The Bank of England recently conducted climate-related stress tests, assessing the financial impact of various global warming scenarios. But regulators haven’t come to terms with the idea that some of climate change’s economic and financial impacts are now unavoidable, no matter how fast decarbonization occurs. Nor, Condon said, have they “really thought through some of the major systemic tipping points,” like weather-driven food supply shortages or major ocean current patterns breaking down.

At a certain stage, the exercise of quantifying societal collapse feels beside the point. The scale of these concerns highlight the futility of the idea of “climate havens,” places that might be protected from these global changes. There’s nowhere to run.

It’s not geography that shields people from disaster, but resources — the ability to relocate and rebuild. Some of the homes that flooded last month in Asheville, for example, were recently built and purchased by émigrés from Florida after investors had mistakenly identified the area as climate-proof. 

For West, the Asheville native, even if she could afford to move to a safer part of town, these trends have changed the town she grew up in. With its recent boom in popularity, Asheville as she remembers it was gone long before Helene washed swathes of it downstream, and so are the assumptions of that safer, cooler world. 

West said she struggled with her feelings as she was writing her prescient paper about Asheville’s risks. “I went to law school hoping that it would help me understand more about how the world around me works,” she said. She had hoped that studying the legal system would help her find answers. “Turns out, it just made me learn so much more about how bad things are — how much work needs to be done.”

For his part, despite his daughter’s concerns, Billy isn’t planning on leaving Sarasota just yet. He hopes his favorite haunts will clean up and come back once again. But he’s not sure how much longer anyone will be willing to keep rebuilding. 

“People found paradise here,” he said. “Paradise lost.”