July 21

 Hello, all. Nice sunny day so far. Should be somewhat moderate in temperature today but starting tomorrow the weather people predict a new stretch of 90s. We turned off the news early and are watching some reruns of our own. I also have a stack of videos borrowed from the library. They provided with a nice Saturday and Sunday watching a couple of seasons of MIDSOMMER MURDERS and a couple of episodes of SHERLOCK. I still have several other disks for the rest of the week.

A paragraph for LAST WEEK IN COLLAPSE caught my eye. I seem to remember some snippet about CATastrophe Bonds in an article about the woes of the insurance industry. This explains it a bit more:

Investors and hedge funds looking for yields not tightly related to the fortunes of the stock market are increasingly turning to CATastrophe bonds, which are basically bundles of disaster insurance contracts that pay most of their profits (if there are any) to institutional investors instead of to insurance companies. This arrangement helps insurance companies offload rising risk caused by flooding and other climate risks. The risk of a year stuffed with disasters grew too great for some insurance companies to cover all clients, fearful that they could be wiped out if a devastating year occurred. The market for CAT bonds began in the 1990s, and has hit record highs (and reportedly record profits) in 2025.

So far this year is shaping up to be another bad one for property damage.

By the way did anyone notice that the Administrations has allowed the transfer of Medicaid information (names, SSNs, addresses, and phone numbers to ICE? I wonder how long it will be before a similar transfer will involve Social Security and Medicare. I wouldn't take any bets on how secure IRS data is or how soon the DOGE boys get their greedy little hands on it.

I found this report on an Arkansas news site (by way of CROOKS&LIARS) which says that the number of Arkansas farmers filing bankruptcy petitions in this year's 4th quarter is nearly double the number of such petitions filed last year. The C&L piece notes that Arkansas farmers went for Trump in a large way and now find themselves in a much worse position. I don't blame Trump for ALL of their problems. The tariff threats have created a great deal of uncertainty and the loss of some markets (such as China) who consider the U.S. unreliable (which we have become). No one likes to make long term plans when the future is so uncertain. But the weather has also played holy hell with wide swaths of the country and farming is a time dependent activity. Seed has to go in the ground at a certain time, the sufficient rains have fall at the right time, there has to be enough sun and appropriate temperatures at the right time followed by harvest at the right time. That schedule has been thoroughly screwed up. Tariffs aren't the only thing that will push food prices up and there is damned little Trump (for all his arrogance) can do about those other things.