Description: Book Review of How to Cope with the Developing Financial Crisis by Ashby Bladen, McGraw Hill, New York, 1979

Description: The author of this article, The Actuary’s editor, notes that this article is a capsule of what may be called “the Angle/Bladen theme.” John C. Angle spoke at Hartford in April 1980 see the Record for that meeting, pp. 188-193. His investment colleague, Ashby Bladen, addressed our Annual Meeting in Montreal last October 1980. Their observations were about mutual life insurance in the United States. The article notes that the current economic environment, with interest rates “far outside the familiar 3% to 6% range,” is a difficult one for life insurers and their traditional products, that we are becoming less conservative when the risk of serious economic trouble is rising, and “a satisfactory future depends on restoring stability, not upon trying to learn how to cope with instability.”

Description: This article is a summary of a November 1981 actuarial club presentation by Robert D. Shapiro. It begins with the rise of Universal Life in 1981 with the climate of high interest rates and minimization of company federal income tax and then discusses the year 1982 with declining interest rates and the changes made to UL.

Description: Our November Query asked which groups, in addition to debtors and those blessed with amply indexed incomes, seem to have profited most conspicuously from the past decade’s inflation. This article summarizes the results.

Description: This report is a brief summary of a symposium held in Sweden in March 1972, initiated and sponsored by the Swedish insurance companies which discusses the side effects of the development of modern chemical industry and the exposure of living organisms to a variety of chemicals in the environment. The danger of the long term effects on health are addressed.

Description: Book Review: Energy Crisis. This book will be of interest to actuaries who routinely making long-range assumptions in their daily work with regard to future interest rates and general economic conditions.

Description: This article reviews environmental issues as discussed in The Doomsday Book by Thames and Hudson, London. From The Actuary, May 1971, Vol. 5, No. 5.

Description: Baseline illustrations for article about the Delphi project to predict economic conditions far into the future in 2024. Measures under examination are 1. Increase in CPI, 2. 10 Year T-Bill yield, 3. S&P500 rate of return and 4. Corporate Baa bond yield. See the SOA website research section for the full report on the Delphi Study of Economic Variables.

Description: Discusses the market, demographic, and macroeconomic factors that affect actuaries' choices for the assumptions they use in the pricing and valuation of many insurance products.

Description: The author notes that “many considerations enter into the determination of investment strategy. Important among these considerations is the maximization of investment income on an after-tax basis rather than on a before-tax basis.” The article then discusses how starting in the early 1960’s insurers, using a marginal tax rate approach, invested heavily in tax exempt bonds. The author, expressing his belief that a major depression is likely to occur in the next 10 years, recommends insurance companies divest of their holding in tax exempt instruments, based on the macroeconomic analysis he presents.