I strongly suspect that this is some kind of internal fuckup, not State Farm being insolvent.

Conservatives love talking about pensions funds needing to be solvent for decades...

But there's never a push that insurance companies need to have cash on hand.

They keep their money in investment accounts to make a profit on it, so how much they have varies at any given moment.

When large scale disasters strike and the market is down they're fucked. If they liquidate at the low price not only does it cost them money. At a large enough volume it excarbates the market being down.

Enough insurance claims at once and it could crash the whole economy.

People don't realize how many different ways we're fucked...

They aren't out of cash they simply gave their execs too many bonuses. I guarantee their deficit could be offset by reducing leadership pay to something more realistic.

This disturbing because I just started working at a State Farm agency. I was told State Farm only makes money off the interest that funds in the bucket that customers pay into. So there should be plenty of money to pay claims. Boss told me thinks it something like 200 billion dollars.

The problem is not risk. It is cost. Climate change means that the cost maintaining human infrastructure where we built it has become higher than we want to pay. And regulators and politicians have prevented insurance companies to raise rates to match the increased cost.

Ultimately, there are 3 ways out of this:

1. Move. Either have a government buy out program for at risk areas; or stop insuring new construction or substantial repairs. Your home was totalled by a hurricane for the second time this decade? Here's your insurance payout; but don't rebuild there because we will not insure you

2. Build infrastructure to reduce costs. This could be more regionally appropriate building codes. Forest management. Waterworks. If we are willing to spend the resources, we have a surprising ability to bend local environments to our will

3. Pay the increased cost.

It's more than that. This was once a fine enough place to live but improper stewardship of the earth has made it a place unreasonable to build a major city, meanwhile we're in a period where people build cities in places utterly unreasonable like phoenix. New York will occasionally get fucked by natural disasters, but what happened in LA where huge portions of the city need complete rebuilds, doesn't happen there. Wildfires have become the norm in California and it's one of the regions rapidly becoming uninsurable, alongside Florida.

The price of the houses is bad, but it's the cost to replace what was lost that insurance cares about alongside the scale of the disaster and the expected mean and variance of time to recurrence. The housing is oversized and otherwise too high value in non-market ways, lacks fire resistance, and is likely to be hit by another wildfire before insurance can recoup what they paid out.

Of all of America's stupid shit simplified English is one that just makes sense. Cheque is an unnecessarily French spelling for a word that you wouldn't think of as French if not spelled that way.