Description: Obsolescence of physical assets and processes is a major component of operational risk for some companies. A simulation experiment shows that managers, who consider the retirement and replacement of individual assets in isolation, have rational incentives, due to risk aversion and uncertainty, to defer the replacement of assets past a time that is optimal from the perspective of the shareholder who owns the entire portfolio of such assets. This results in measurable wealth destruction, —and a demonstrable opportunity to significantly enhance a company’s value. A practical decision model for the replacement timing of fixed, physical assets, which creates wealth by minimizing the long-term consumption of scarce resources, is provided.

Description: Investment Fallacies: Bitcoin Fallacies

Description: This presentation is a panel discussion, session 54PD, from the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Society of Actuaries, held October 24-27 in New York. Asking the question ‘what's causing a scarcity of capital in the life insurance and life reinsurance industries?’ the panelists discuss emerging sources of capital, and the issues surrounding capital, looking at possible responses from ceding companies, reinsurers, regulators, and rating agencies. Discussion from participants is included. From the Record of Society of Actuaries, Volume 30, No. 3.

Description: Asset Adequacy Analysis for the Long-Term Care Product: A Case Study by Amy Pahl from Long-Term Care Newsletter, December 2004, Issue No. 13.

Description: The values of life insurance and annuity liabilities move in opposite directions in response to a change in the underlying mortality. Natural hedging utilizes this to stabilize aggregate liability cash flows. Our study shows empirical evidence that insurers who utilize natural hedging also charge lower premiums than otherwise similar insurers. This indicates that insurers who are able to utilize natural hedging have a competitive advantage. In addition, we show how a mortality swap might be used to provide the benefits of natural hedging to a firm that writes only one of the lines of business.

Description: This article lists potential problems as a result of the elimination of Thirty-Year Treasury Auction Issue. Some problems mentioned are 1 discounting pension liabilities, 2 bond market 3 swap curve and 4 liquidity.

Description: This is the abstract of the paper Risk Classification by Fuzzy Cluster. In this paper an algorithm for risk classification is proposed. This algorithm is based on the concepts of fuzzy cluster. We test our algorithm with two examples, the results are very promising.

Description: This paper discusses both the theoretical and the application aspects of stress testing in managing enterprise risks. Effective stress testing maximizes the risk adjusted enterprise profit by controlling major risks financial, strategic, operational and hazard upon identifying risk metrics and modeling the correlations. A case study is included for demonstration purposes.

Description: This paper defines Distributable Earnings as the generalized pricing and valuation framework for financial contracts containing the requirement to hold capital or reserves in support of the obligations. It examines the Market Value paradigm and its foundation arising from the pricing of fixed income securities. It reconciles these two methods, showing that market value methods ignore mandatory capital and reserve requirements, which carry both risk and cost. The paper makes the case for the Distributable Earnings framework, not Market Value, as the true basis for economic value for these financial contracts. Finally, it concludes that this framework must be employed in risk-management processes, else fail to recognize a significant source of risk.