Description: This collection of essays provides a thought-provoking array of views and perspectives related to Financial Wellness.

Description: Open Architecture retirement advice for average Americans is still in the future; business model biases across all industry business silos may impact SPIA sales

Description: The essay briefly discussed the impacts from implementing ORSA to the main stakeholders in the insurance industry. Those stakeholders include: insurers, regulators, policyholders, investors, rating agencies, insurance industry employees and general public. Part of the essay collection "Risk Metrics for Decision Making and ORSA"

Description: Many call this the sub-prime crisis, but risky mortgages were simply symptomatic of the underlying excesses building through the financial system. Investors, government, lenders and borrowers were all at fault. Where did the skeptics go?

Description: In this mortgage crisis, it appears mortgage brokers and mortgage originating bankers were similar to unchecked MGAs. These brokers and banks had an incentive to produce mortgages that would generate fees for them. Those mortgagees would then be sold to investors, generating additional fees – but it appears there were often no incentives to align the interests of those mortgage producers with the purchasers of these mortgages. The brokers and banks “did not have any skin in the game.”

Description: Interest rates rose from 2004 through 2007, so adjustable mortgage rates increased and many borrowers fell behind. After home prices topped out in 2006, speculators and some buyers who had overstretched found it impossible to refinance. This caused mortgage insurance claims. Insurers may want to study others’ missteps.

Description: This essay advocates for the consideration of risk in an interdisciplinary framework. An "effective resilience" metric is introduced as a way to reflect an organization's exposure and response to an adverse event, and to measure the ability of the organization to mitigate and recover from the resulting reduction in its operating level. Part of the essay collection "Risk Metrics for Decision Making and ORSA"

Description: This article discusses pointing out flaws in Incentive Compensation program using short term financial metrics like Total Shareholder Return may miss non-short term financial risk and non-financial risks.

Description: Investment Fallacies: A real-world approach to Value at Risk

Description: With the possible exception of full faith and credit debts of the United States, every loan carries some risk with it regardless of the borrower, and this risk varies depending on the creditworthiness of the person or institution that is supposed to repay the debt. Bearing that risk requires some sort of capital, both as a legal requirement and as evidence of good sense in lending, but recently we seem to have forgotten the basic relationship between a loan and the capital associated with it. The lesson of the current debacle is, or certainly ought to be, that the risk inherent in a financial transaction cannot be made to go away by the mere act of repackaging that transaction and renaming it.