Description: Feature article summarizing a talk given by Andrew Lo at the SOA 2009 Annual Meeting on the credit crisis and why risk management failed to stop the excessive risk taking.

Description: Highlights a new research paper on determining discount rates for pension plans, by John Turner. The paper breaks new ground on deciding on the appropriate discount rate for untradeable benefit obligations, with a comprehensive summary of the field.

Description: The article makes reference to how the intervention by government agencies and institutions into the financial marketplace are creating distortions. This artificial tampering into market mechanisms will likely result in major financial dislocations down the road as natural economic forces (coined by the term "invisible hand") eventually are allowed to come into play.

Description: Consensus of viewpoints from a group discussion on economic forecasting at the March meeting of the Canadian Institute of Actuaries.

Description: This brief article presents historical stock exchange aggregate returns, comparing results in the United States and United Kingdom.

Description: This abstract describes a paper that investigates the effect of ambiguity on the market for insurance when preferences are ordered by comparison of Choquet expected utilities.

Description: Introduction to option pricing, with special attention to issues in applying these tools to price equity-linked insurance products. Clear, accessible explanation of key results of mathematical finance including risk-neutral valuation.

Description: There have been continual advances in the modeling of financial series but most are aimed at the pricing of derivatives. Different criteria are needed for development of scenarios for risk management. Some recent methods will be reviewed with an eye on risk-management applications, including using the simulated method of moments to parameterize multifactor models, fractional differencing and other methods to model series with persistent autocorrelation, and models to flatten out the volatility smile, such as jump-diffusion models. These methods will be illustrated with applications to inflation, interest rates, equity prices and exchange rates.

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: This article presents some observations on inverted yield curves of U.S. Treasury securities and the correlation of volatility of Treasury security interest rates with their absolute level. The time covered by the study is December 1953 to December 1988. From Society of Actuaries Financial Reporting Monograph, M-AS99-1.