Description: This session is about recent economic developments, including such developments internationally.

Description: Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) are reshaping the insurance industry landscape. Some M&A transactions even garner wide media coverage. The presenters discuss current trends in recent M&A transactions and explore considerations for buyers and sellers leading up to the transactions.

Description: This is a panel discussion about the economic outlook in the 1960's particularly for equities. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1962, Vol. 14 Pt. 2

Description: Overview on current trends in medical practice impacting the LTC insurance business with a focus on dementia, risk stratification, and predictive modeling.

Description: This session from the 1982 SOA Spring Meeting discusses the recent economic environment, the changes in household economic activity, the effect of the continued high rate of inflation on the needs and responses of customers of financial security products and participants of non-insured employee benefit plans during their working years. From Record of the Society of Actuaries 1982, Volume 8, No. 1.

Description: The Bermuda International Life and Annuity Conference highlights Bermuda’s enhanced capital and solvency framework, and growing long-term (re)insurance sector.

Description: This article summarizes a recent revenue ruling concerning the insurance company qualification of an affiliate that reinsures retiree health benefits under an arrangement entered into by a VEBA.

Description: Article from The Actuary, April 1985, Volume 20, No. 4 that discusses from usury to interest. Usury definitions are 1 The lending out of money with an interest charge for its use: the taking or practice of taking interest 2 An unconscionable or exorbitant rate or amount of interest, specifically interest in excess of a legal rate charged to a borrower for the use of money. Between definitions 1 and 2 are 2000 years of Western history, beginning with Biblical strictures against charging any interest and reaching today's sophisticated credit economy, in which interest, per se, is accepted and only excessive interest is illegal.

Description: This articles explores the notion of whether the old rules and paradigms of investment strategy and caution may no longer be applicable in today’s financial environment, because things were “different this time.”

Description: “What is the likelihood of market crashes? This article seeks to provide an answer to this and related questions by focusing mainly on the crash of October 1987. Specifically, we shall seek answers to three questions: 1. Given the history of market returns, was the crash of ‘87 unusual? 2. How do conditional variance models such as GARCH behave around periods of extreme moves in the market? 3. What is the impact of the crash on backtesting and performance evaluation?” Editor’s Note: The following article originally appeared in the Winter 1998 issue of The BARRA Newsletter, Horizon, and is reprinted here with permission.