Jeff Guo

Insurance is basically a technology to transfer risk from one person to another, from one place to another, from me to my insurance company, from my insurance company to a reinsurance company.

Catastrophe bonds are kind of the next evolution of that.

They let insurance companies take some of the risks they're facing, the risk of a giant hurricane or earthquake, and transfer those risks onto a crowd of investors around the world.

Yeah, I mean, why not even a cat bond for a worldwide pandemic?

Michael Bennett works on these kinds of creative financial ideas at the World Bank.

There's actually a fancy Wall Street term for getting creative.

It's called structured finance.

And Michael actually got his start at a bunch of those fancy Wall Street firms.

How thick are the carpets at the World Bank?

Yeah, yeah.

At the World Bank, the goal is not to make money.

It is to fight poverty.

So in 2016, he and his team came up with a creative new use for catastrophe bonds to share the risk of pandemics.

They basically went around designing their own custom pandemic insurance policy.

At the top of that list of threats was, of course, Ebola.

Also on the list was pandemic influenza, like the type that swept through the world right after World War I, as well as, you know, a couple other types of viruses.

The World Bank went around to investors asking them, hey, do you want to bet against a pandemic caused by one of these six types of viruses?

So investors agreed that if a global pandemic happened in the next few years, some or all of those $300 million would go to the World Bank to help developing countries.

And in the meantime, the World Bank would be paying them a decent amount of interest, like tens of millions of dollars a year.

But then came the winter of 2020.