Description: Feature article discussing the use of fair value or market consistent measurement for the valuation of insurance liabilities.

Description: This article serves as a Solvency II primer by first introducing the Solvency II framework and then identifying several implementation issues that are still being resolved.

Description: This article from The Actuary Magazine discusses the paper issued by the Emerging Issues Advisory Group on fair value liabilities. A change in the method used for financial reporting is on the way. The questions, what are the changes and what they mean to you are answered here.

Description: An update on the SOA's financial reporting research projects.

Description: 2003 Valuation Actuary Symposium, San Diego, CA. Panelists in this session discussed embedded-value and fair-value practices, similarities and differences between EV and fair value, and whether embedded value and fair value are evolving into a single, principles-based measure of value.

Description: The FASB is contemplating a joint project with the IASB on a new comprehensive accounting standard for insurance based on its Preliminary Views on Insurance Contracts. This article suggests that the best way to achieve the IASB objective of market-consistent valuation of liabilities is to use an explicit liquid/illiquid economic valuation and reporting paradigm.

Description: Just about everything that took place on the international front this quarter was influenced to some degree by the subprime crisis. Article discusses April - June developments in the creation of fair value accounting regulations, which progresses in spite of concerns that using a fair value accounting basis for financial instruments lacking a deep trading market makes does not make sense.

Description: Here we are led to draw a distinction between “wild” markets and “free” markets. A wild market is unregulated and unscrutinized. Information flows are purposely impeded for competitive reasons and reduced to trickles from rumor and espionage. No one knows what anyone else is doing, and pricing is blind and haphazard. In such a market, there are no safeguards against anticompetitive behavior and no guarantees that the market will clear. The only guarantee is that there will be liquidity crises.

Description: 1993 SOA Spring Meeting, Boston. The session is about fair-value financial reporting. It discussed market value/present value, economic value/value added, Financial Accounting Standards Board initiatives, and Europe 1992.

Description: This session 5PD of the 1998 SOA Annual Meeting panel examines the recent developments and emerging thinking on efforts to explore and develop a fair value or market value based accounting approach. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 24, No. 3.