Description: The author suggests that the optimal use of capital requires one to find a way to strike a balance between the conflicting desires for maximizing long term profit and minimizing short term loss.

Description: The author explores the issue of longevity risk with its implications for life insurers and society at large, and concludes that the actuarial profession is in a unique position to understand longevity risk and offer solutions.

Description: This article discusses the impact on the policyholders and the insurance companies of the phase-out of the deductibility of policy loan interest resulting from the new tax law.

Description: This article discusses the risk-sharing arrangements provided by a number of different types of hybrid pensions, focusing on hybrid designs in the United States, Canada and the Netherlands, with particular emphasis on the New Brunswick (Canada) shared risk plan.

Description: This article provides a formulaic method of comparing unit reserves on different valuation bases. This enables a duration-by-duration comparison of the components of the calculation on two different valuation bases. This can be done ignoring taxes or assuming taxes are recognized in calculating the expected return on capital in pricing.

Description: This is an editorial warning about the escalating costs of Medicare as outlined in the 1983 Annual Report of The Board of Trustees of The Federal Hospital Insurance Trust Fund. The editorial ends with a question asking what the actuarial profession, and its members individually, ought to be doing that they aren’t already doing?

Description: John Naisbitt, in Megatrends, defined a megatrend as a general shift in thinking or approach affecting countries, industries and organizations. This article challenges actuaries to consider off-the-charts factors within their risk maps and consider their potential impact.

Description: This article provides background on managed target volatility funds and how they can be used for variable annuities and the mitigation of gap risk.

Description: The author discusses the first life table, or life table model, which was produced in 1662 by John Graunt in his Natural and Political Observations. He notes that the brief, crude table was both inaccurate and unrealistic, but nonetheless, proved to be the source of one of the most powerful concepts and valuable tools in demography and actuarial science.

Description: Article Disparate Origins Of Life And Non-Life Insurances by Beard in The Actuary, February 1979, Volume 13, Number 2