Description: Insurance companies use derivatives to manage and mitigate risks that are inherent in their investment or liability portfolios, including traditional asset/liability matching, dynamic hedging and static hedging. The authors explore how Solvency II will influence life insurers’ hedging strategies.

Description: The Phase 3 tax is the description given to the federal income tax imputable to amounts withdrawn from the Policyholders Surplus Account maintained under the federal income tax law. This article discusses certain facets of the federal income Phase 3 tax as it relates to these withdrawals. Still significant for a large health insurer that has been in existence since before 1984 should health care become nationalized.

Description: Article is about community rating and risk adjustment including possible disadvantages for healthy experience-rated or self-insured groups.

Description: Review of The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day, by prominent statistician David J. Hand.

Description: On the eve of dissemination of an interim report by the President’s Commission on Pension Policy, The New York Times has printed four articles May 18-21 entitled “The Pension Tangle.” This addresses the first of this quartet, regarding the threat of inflation to the private pension system.

Description: Discusses the financial impact upon the medical plans for group policyholders, caused by the requirement to continue within the group plan employees and their dependents who become ineligible under the regular eligibility provisions.

Description: Highlights of Society of Actuaries research efforts in the financial services practice area.

Description: Article The Actuary Revealed by Dinney in The Actuary, May 1979, Volume 13, Number 3

Description: Education department article that outlines the new SOA General Insurance fellowship track that puts the SOA in the position of offering actuarial education in the full range of actuarial practice areas.

Description: The following commentary, after highlighting the strong linkage that currently exists between valuation reserves and nonforfeiture value requirements, discusses the origins of this relationship. It is concluded that this linkage is undesirable and should be severed. Editor’s Note: This report was prepared for use by the Committee on Non-forfeiture Values. Mr. Gardner is Vice Chairman of the Committee.