Description: Since spring, with the marked improvement in the payments deficit of the United States, the climate for discussion of reform of the world currency systems has become much more favorable. Perhaps our subject today should more fittingly be entitled Monetary Reform for the World Economy. Discussion focuses on the steps that can be taken to insure that enough liquidity will be provided to finance expanding world trade while maintaining stable price levels, and on how reform measures can be drawn to avoid the danger that additional liquidity will encourage countries to run chronic deficits.

Description: We discussed impacts of procrastination and strategies to harness the power of inertia to aid individuals in their pursuit of future financial well-being.

Description: Financial economics is the discipline underlying all financial services. No matter what your area of specialty or your role in your organization, an understanding of financial economics is essential. As you will learn in this module, financial economics is the study of how individuals and institutions acquire, save, and invest money. These activities are fundamental to institutions and individuals. Thus, not only will this module help you be a more knowledgeable actuary, it will also help you with your personal financial planning.

Description: View information on the Health Economics Module.

Description: This paper presents a generalization of the principal current methods of financial decision making. In the way physical sciences benefit from new general theories that encompass those theories they succeed, the science of finance can benefit from the development of a general framework that encompasses many of the current methods of financial analysis. The paper develops a general framework for financial decision-making from a few simple axioms of rational economic behavior.

Description: This article examines Consumer Price Index, how it works and some considerations when using it in financial agreements.

Description: Arguments for establishing a monetary system based on an aggregate commodity standard.

Description: This panel discussion defines inflation, discusses inflationary outlook in the near future, the psychological effect of inflation on savings habits, trends, industry responses, and effects on agent compensation, interest rates and expense factors.

Description: This paper represents a brief progress report on research, being sponsored by the Casualty Actuarial Society CAS and the Society of Actuaries SOA, in the area of modeling of economic series. In particular, research is being undertaken to provide a foundation for the actuarial community’s modeling of a variety of economic variables, including interest rates, equity returns, inflation, unemployment rates, and real estate price levels. The specific objectives of this research are to provide a summary of the literature in the area of economic scenario modeling, identify data sources and methodologies in this area useful to the actuarial profession, and produce working software for economic modeling, including appropriate documentation, to be made available to the general actuarial community in order to allow actuaries to use and build upon this research.

Description: We consider Libor market model and calibration process. We estimate some interest rate derivatives such as Caps and Swaptions. We use Monte Carlo methods with appropriate dynamics under spot measure and forward measure. Imposing martingale discretization property, the same quantities are estimated again to see a contrast or discrepancy in light of confidence interval. Based on algorithms discussed in the paper, “Arbitrage-free discretizations of lognormal forward Libor and swap rate models” by Glasserman, P and Zhao, X 2000, the algorithms are implemented in excel VBA. Starting with current market data such as FRAs and Bond Prices, we describe steps involved to estimate the price of interest rate derivatives such as Caps and Swaptions, which would be beneficial to the practitioners in the industry.