Description: Presented at May 2002 Spring Meeting. This session describes the general features of advance programs operated by various Federal Home Loan Banks, summarizes potential benefits to insurers and identifies key issues surrounding the programs.

Description: This article speculates on the presence and magnitude of the benefits attributable to regular rebalancing of one's investment portfolio. It surveys the extant literature, discusses certain implications, and presents conclusions.

Description: This 2001 article discusses the requirement to assess hedge effectiveness in the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s new statement on derivatives accounting, FAS 133, Accounting for Derivative Instruments and Hedging Activities, as critical for qualifying for “special” hedge accounting. The article provides analysis of different approaches and the potential difficulties encountered. This article is reprinted with permission from Derivatives Week.

Description: This article presents new funding instruments for equity-indexed life insurance and annuity products.

Description: This article discusses how FHLB advances, i.e. low cost loans, can supply valuable risk management benefits. By carefully structuring an advance to mature coincident with the anticipated premium inflows generated by insurance products, a company can largely eliminate future net cash flows and consequently the need to invest them in uncertain capital markets.

Description: Discusses the current options and the benefits of outsourcing various corporate functions.

Description: From a panel discussion session at the 2000 Valuation Actuary Symposium held in Washington DC, September 14-15, 2000 Overview of New York Regulation 163, including the limits on different types of derivative activities, the Derivative Use Plan required by New York, and the reporting and control requirements.

Description: This session at the SOA 2003 Washington, DC Spring Meeting addresses how to objectively measure a portfolio manager's investment performance, evaluate relevancy of market indices as performance benchmarks for insurance liabilities, and successfully benchmark performance against insurance liabilities.

Description: Recent passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act increased the access that insurers have to low-cost loans advances offered by the individual banks of the Federal Home Loan Bank FHLB system. This article describes the general features of how advance programs work, their potential benefits to insurers and key issues to consider.

Description: This article describes the nature and features of collateralized mortgage obligations [CMO], identifies their key risk factors, and suggests steps that small insurers can take to effectively and economically model them.