Description: Here we are led to draw a distinction between “wild” markets and “free” markets. A wild market is unregulated and unscrutinized. Information flows are purposely impeded for competitive reasons and reduced to trickles from rumor and espionage. No one knows what anyone else is doing, and pricing is blind and haphazard. In such a market, there are no safeguards against anticompetitive behavior and no guarantees that the market will clear. The only guarantee is that there will be liquidity crises.

Description: The purpose of this paper is to outline the development of a critical illness rider to be launched on a guaranteed level term product. The paper addresses the following topics: market needs analysis, design considerations, benefit design, pricing assumption, and development of pricing model and pricing results, including sensitivity testing.

Description: U.K. life insurers writing participating business have, since the end of 2004, been required by their regulator, the Financial Services Authority FSA, to value their assets and liabilities on a market-consistent basis. The purpose of this paper is to explain the new valuation approach based on market-consistent values and its rationale set out the issues faced by life insurers in implementing the new regime and explain how these issues have been addressed by insurers.

Description: Response to Life Insurance 2020 Foresight – A Call for Essays. An essay stating the author’s vision for the future of the life insurance sector.

Description: Analysis of recent changes to Maine public pension plans, including risk sharing provisions to reduce market risk and funding reform to improve sustainability.

Description: Enhanced or impaired annuities are life annuities underwritten to reflect annuitants' actual mortality. They are not currently prevalent in the U.S. or Canada, where life annuities assume low mortality and are thus unfair for impaired lives. This paper looks at the present annuity marketplace in the United States and Canada. It also reviews the underwriting and marketing of life annuities in the United Kingdom where “enhanced” life annuities are available for a broader cross section of the marketplace. It also reviews the use of P&C risk classification techniques and how they might apply to the annuity marketplace as well as potential legal constraints on broader risk classification for life annuities.

Description: To be financially "well" is unique to an individual. Following a hierarchy of needs is key, along with saving more than the talking heads tell you to.

Description: Planning one's own retirement financing is a new challenge, and Americans need to hear a consensus message from the experts, not a diverse chorus of opinions.

Description: Public DB plans have fatal designs such as basing benefits on a few years of earnings. Redesigning DB to be similar to SS will alleviate solvency challenges.

Description: Response to Life Insurance 2020 Foresight – A Call for Essays. An essay stating the author’s vision for the future of the life insurance sector. Focus is on the retirement savings need in the future both in the private individual sector and in the public sector.