Description: Crises are devastating. They leave behind a high amount of entropy unemployment, poverty, lack of safety. But this is half the truth. The other half says that crises are to some extend good, because they provide a natural crash test to discover current practices’ risks and limitations, and in response, give rise to more efficient regulation, to financial innovations and to the wakening of the vitalizing powers of society, as the old and corrupted die and new ideas emerge and give us the opportunity to reflect upon the future we want to have.

Description: The Society of Actuaries Research Institute’s Aging and Retirement Strategic Research Program is pleased to release a collection of essays addressing the impact of inflation on retirement and retirement-related issues.

Description: Story submitted for the 10th Speculative Fiction Contest - 2013.

Description: Entry in the Speculative Fiction Contest 2019

Description: Winning essay in the 2020 Disruptions to the Actuarial Profession Contest

Description: In 2007 the International Accounting Standards Board IASB released a discussion paper proposing a new accounting model for insurance contracts, known as the current exit value model. One aspect of the proposed accounting model is that claim liabilities would need to include explicit margins satisfying certain criteria. Currently it is common for U.S. medical insurers to include explicit margins in their claim liabilities. However, we demonstrate that the margin approach most commonly used today by U.S. medical insurers does not satisfy the objectives articulated in the IASB discussion paper regarding the role of margins. We then propose a new formula for including explicit margins in U.S. medical insurance claim liabilities in a manner that is more compatible with the principles articulated in the IASB discussion paper. Finally, we illustrate our proposed claim liability formula using an example drawn from real-life data.

Description: Investment Fallacies: The Fallacy of the Fed Model

Description: Various ingredients contributed to the current financial crisis, and we can learn many lessons from the crisis. Yet rather than myopically focus on the particular minutiae of the current circumstances, we ought to pay special attention to those central issues that underpin the current crisis, past crises and future crises. Focus is on risk adjusting reported profits.

Description: The upside of the downturn is that these powerful, influential, connected and important, yet incompetent people can be removed from their positions. To quote a great insight of Ayn Rand: “There is no substitute for competence.”

Description: Many experts tout the benefits of index investing, but history tells us that when enough investors do the same thing it tends to end badly. Stay tuned!