Description: Discussion of FAS 133 Implementation Issue B36 relating to the implications for the financial reporting of modco and similar reinsurance treaties where the assuming company assumes some investment risk from assets still owned by the ceding company.

Description: An article in the form of a fictional letter to the editor and response dealing with the complexities of the current reinsurance market.

Description: This article provides an update on the Life Treaty Project. From Reinsurance Section News, November 2007, Issue No. 61.

Description: The following paper sets out the approach being used by Reinsurance Group of America RGA to apply SFAS 133 Implementation Issue B36 to coinsurance funds-withheld and modified coinsurance transactions that are classified as “financial reinsurance.”

Description: What will be left of the reinsurance marketplace when the consolidations are over?

Description: Reinsurance is a global business, yet reinsurers suffer from widely disparate accounting and regulatory requirements from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, particularly in the areas of credit for reinsurance and collateral requirements. Recently, insurance regulators in the United States and worldwide have taken dramatic steps toward harmonization, mutual recognition and regulatory cooperation in connection with regulation of reinsurance, with a focus on modernizing collateral requirements.

Description: Departing chairman’s column recapping past accomplishments and describing future section initiatives.

Description: Summary of the results of the 2011 Life Reinsurance Survey. Included are US and Canadian individual life results for recurring, portfolio and retrocession reinsurance.

Description: Life reinsurers have done a relatively good job in competing with banks for market share of structured solutions, yet one might conclude that life reinsurers have not done a good job competing with an even bigger and more powerful competitor- the client company’s own retention limit. This article addresses the question: Is there anything a life reinsurer can do to change its business model to serve the needs of a large-retention life insurance company?

Description: This paper aims to help financial and insurance practitioners better recognize, assess, and respond to large scale, large impact, rare events (LSLIRE’s) which are occurrences currently often wrongly labeled as being unpredictable black swans. A black swan, as Nassim Taleb defines it in his popular book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Random House & Penguin (2007-2010 2nd. Ed.) is 1) an outlier event, which 2) carries extreme impact, and 3) “makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact.” Elsewhere, Taleb says it is unpredictable, which is why people concoct explanations. Other people use the term in many and various ways, to enfold events missed by most people because they are rare, missed by computer models and/or experts, and to include events they simply seem personally to have misunderstood. The paper also discusses building better ways to assess such events’ background characteristics, emergence dynamics, logics, and other foreseeable attributes. A secondary focus is educating practitioners to better respond - whether to limit damage or to take advantage of - the opportunities that arise from what others are likely to miss or misjudge during and after the emergence of LSLIRE (AKA black swan) events.