Description: Acquisitions and divestitures present unique challenges to actuaries, both before and after the sale. The panelists at this presentation address the following issues for pension as well as for health and welfare plans: 1. What considerations are there when a company is being bought or sold? 2. Can the buyer and the seller ever agree upon the retiree medical liability? 3. Is the buyer interested in the income statement or the balance sheet? 4. What are some of the hidden liabilities? 5. What regulatory issues need to be considered? From Record of Society of Actuaries Vol. 17, No. 3B.

Description: In this session, senior pension and insurance investment professionals will share their thoughts on current investment topics. Attendees will hear about leading edge investment ideas and practices from industry leaders.

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: Many retirement actuaries have experience developing, implementing, and monitoring Liability Driven Investing (LDI) strategies for plan sponsors. These strategies typically involve modifying a plan’s investment strategy to remove a significant portion of the investment and interest rate risk now or at some point in the future when specific triggers are met. The tactics often involve the use of fixed income assets to cash flow and/or duration match the liabilities. In the spirit of helping actuaries expand their roles in an evolving defined contribution world, this article explores the application of LDI and derisking strategies within defined contribution and individual retirement accounts. The economic theory behind this approach is called the lifecycle hypothesis, or lifecycle finance. The benefits of the lifecycle finance method are that it provides a safe approach to save for retirement and a secure source of floor income during retirement. Similar to pension plans, each individual has his or her own idiosyncratic needs, wants, and risks that should be considered. Actuaries are uniquely situated to help defined contribution plan sponsors, individuals, and even themselves implement the lifecycle finance approach by developing and distributing tools and methods that focus on income (rather than wealth), LDI strategies, and personalization.

Description: This paper examines the Federal Housing Administration's [FHA] historical termination data on individual single family mortgages. These FHA data can be used to help understand recent past experience as well as to forecast future experience.

Description: Chapter 4 describes growth issues including multiple account problems of the old SAR, the amount of money in the AFOREs, and portfolio composition in the AFOREs. From Retrospective and Perspective Analysis of the Privatized Mandatory Pension System in Mexico, M-RS02-1.

Description: Presenter discusses some techniques for minimizing and controlling the damage to defined-benefit pension surpluses caused by market forces. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 25, No. 2.

Description: Exam FM/2 sample questions for Derivatives Markets textbook.

Description: This article addresses the difficulties of risk modeling in a poor economic environment. The problems include imperfect vendors of data, facing events that have never occurred before, unpredictable consumer behavior, conflicting data sources, and AAA credit doesn't always mean AAA.

Description: Investment risk management has become a core competency of insurance companies, and much has been discussed on this topic. This session examines the current investment risk management practices such as product line specific hedging and macro hedging, with a focus on what still remains to be addressed—whether the tradeoff of addition risk management is worthwhile.