Description: In this article, the author discusses the report on Insurance Holding Companies recently published by the New York Insurance Departmentconcerning surplus levels. The author questions whether a complicated mathematical approach using risk theory will produce a better result than traditional rules of thumb and experience.

Description: This article notes that life insurance companies have long used sophisticated techniques for appraising capital investment, and explores the question of whether these techniques can be applied to other industries.

Description: Panel discussion focused on the Effective Use of Capital. Topics included: 1. Definition of capital 2. Appropriate level of capital and surplus in a life insurance company 3. Alternatives for deploying capital 4. Returns a life company should demand on invested capital 5. How much a company should charge for lending its capital in reinsurance transactions

Description: The author suggests that the optimal use of capital requires one to find a way to strike a balance between the conflicting desires for maximizing long term profit and minimizing short term loss.

Description: Discusses capital markets, bank loan financing, surplus relief reinsurance, and sound capital structures. From the 1988 Record of Society of Actuaries, Vol. 14, No. 2.

Description: This session at the SOA 1990 San Francisco Spring Meeting is about aspects of surplus management including objectives of a structured capital management program, surplus management for a stock versus mutual company, and sources and costs of raising capital.

Description: This material, Appendix II of the 1987 Valuation Actuary Handbook, is an appendix to Chapter II of the Handbook, ‘Methods of Analyzing cash Flows to Test for Reserve Adequacy.’ In this appendix, the authors provide more detail on what they call cash-flow based surplus, and how this concept can be used. It is defined as the amount of cash that could be removed and leave assets sufficient to mature all benefits on a true economic basis, i.e. ignoring statutory accounting requirements, under an assumed interest rate and experience scenario.

Description: Investment Fallacies: The Misconceptions of Retirement Risks

Description: Increased attention was paid to regulatory capital with the global financial crisis in 2008. Whilst companies may not have the incentives to retain a large amount of capital in the absence of regulatory capital requirements, overcapitalized entities can have drawback such as its impact on competitiveness. There are other weaknesses in the regulatory capital model such as its limitation in facilitating risk-based decisions as regulatory capital does not necessarily reflect the economic reality and risks an entity faces. Nonetheless, there are ways for regulators and/or companies to handle the weaknesses in the regulatory capital model. For instance, granularity can be introduced in determining regulatory capital. Economic capital can be used to encourage entities to implement risk management controls and facilitate risk-based business decisions (e.g., risk-adjusted performance assessment and risk-based capital allocation). Ultimately, hav ing effective risk management and risk-based capital determination are ways to prevent company failures and bankruptcies.

Description: This paper investigates the optimal multi-period proportional reinsurance strategy that minimizes the ruin probability of an insurer. Some conditions under which it is optimal to have no reinsurance are derived. Based on these results, a new concept, capital threshold of proportional reinsurance, is introduced. In the case of two periods, a lower bound of the capital threshold of proportional reinsurance is provided. Some economic implications and properties of this new concept are also discussed.