Dear friends,

The saying “anything is possible” isn’t quite true, but much more is possible than we sometimes might think. For example, it is now clear that United States Treasury bonds are not the risk-free investments they were long assumed to be. The risk-free assumption was rooted in a failure of imagination, a failure to recognize the possibilities of divided government. So too for many global catastrophic risks. Recent research on the economics of climate change has emphasized the importance of catastrophic outcomes outside the range …