Description: This article discusses capital market cycles, specifically considering whether or not 2008 was a good time to buy. It concludes that “stocks have likely only recently entered the buying opportunity range on an aggregate basis. However, from a psychological and risk management perspective, we should strongly consider that stock prices will revert beyond the mean for many years, perhaps even decades, before they get better.”

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 essay explores the role that the emerging defined contribution retirement system may be playing in the growth of wealth inequality in the United States. The current system leaves many Americans with little or no retirement savings. Those with higher accumulation levels appear to invest proportionally more in equities, which may have an exponential effect of balances over long time periods. The author hypothesizes that willingness to take investment risk involves the relationship between the amount an investor has accumulated and what she/he needs in order to cover basic costs of living. This is one reason that investors with greater accumulation levels may be able to earn higher rates of return. The essay concludes by suggesting that the U.S. defined contribution system should include all workers and provide additional fiduciary guidance. Examples reforms, both in the U.S. and other countries, are provided.

Description: Obesity is poised to overtake smoking as the leading preventable cause of death. What parallels can be drawn between public and reinsurance industry responses to these two lifestyle choices? Swiss Re investigates.

Description: This table is an analysis of engagement among adults age 55 and older by health status. Engagement is defined as time spent in paid work, formal volunteering informal volunteering and caregiving activities.

Description: This article highlights the paper presented by Eric Short, F.I.A., actuary and journalist with the London Financial Times, presented to the Students Society of the Institute earlier this year. His conclusion was bleak he quoted from Hagel: What experience and history teach us is that people and governments never have learned anything from history or acted on principles deduced from it.

Description: This table is an analysis of engagement among adults age 55 and older. Engagement is defined as time spent in paid work, formal volunteering informal volunteering and caregiving activities.

Description: This is an article about the lack of savings by the baby boomers and how it will affect retirement and the ramifications for Social Security. The author believes that baby boomers will choose to continue to work and alleviate some of the burden on social security.

Description: This is the second part of a 2 part series on Real options analysis (ROA). This article looks into the limitations of using financial option theory when doing real options analysis with projects that are long-dated and uncertain, such as: 1. First-degree homogeneity, 2. Uncertainty must derive from Brownian motion, and 3. Risk neutrality.