Description: This paper examines the characteristics of an ideal product and the type of institution that would be well positioned to offer the ideal product which would allow a housing asset to be a viable retirement asset.

Description: This article discusses the impact of increasing activity with respect to Solvency II in the United States.

Description: With the possible exception of full faith and credit debts of the United States, every loan carries some risk with it regardless of the borrower, and this risk varies depending on the creditworthiness of the person or institution that is supposed to repay the debt. Bearing that risk requires some sort of capital, both as a legal requirement and as evidence of good sense in lending, but recently we seem to have forgotten the basic relationship between a loan and the capital associated with it. The lesson of the current debacle is, or certainly ought to be, that the risk inherent in a financial transaction cannot be made to go away by the mere act of repackaging that transaction and renaming it.

Description: This article contains the statistics of the equity premium or market risk premium [MRP] uses in 2011 for 56 countries. The paper also contains the references used to justify the MRP and comments from persons that both use and do not use MRP.

Description: This article argues that wealth managers should advocate dynamic spending in proportion to survival probabilities, adjusted up for exogenous pension income and down for longevity risk aversion. The authors criticize the rule of thumb of spending a fixed 'x' percent of assets for retirement planning purposes.