Description: Health Watch, Issue 79, December 2015, Health Watch

Description: International Accounting Standards: a discussion of Exposure Draft 5 dealing with specific requirements for insurance companies

Description: Discussion of a New York Times article dealing with the arbitraging of policy loan proceeds by investing them in money market instruments whose yields were well above the policy loan interest rate.

Description: The article makes reference to how the intervention by government agencies and institutions into the financial marketplace are creating distortions. This artificial tampering into market mechanisms will likely result in major financial dislocations down the road as natural economic forces (coined by the term "invisible hand") eventually are allowed to come into play.

Description: Book Review of How to Cope with the Developing Financial Crisis by Ashby Bladen, McGraw Hill, New York, 1979

Description: The article compares China's variable annuities with India's NAV guaranteed ULIPs. Both of them mostly working on CPPI. The comparison is mainly focused on market competition landscape, unit-linked business market share, incentives of introducing the product, and the macro-economic environment in the two countries.

Description: The rules governing the tax treatment of distributions from life insurance or annuity contracts are complex. Worse, the relevant IRC section, section 72, seems at times to be the product of a conspiracy in restraint of understanding.

Description: This actually is a copy of an appendix of a research paper sponsored by the SOA Committee on Finance Research. You can read the entire research paper: “Lapse Modeling for the Post-Level Period—a Practical Application of Predictive Modeling” at the SOA site https://www.soa.org/Research/Research-Projects/Finance-Investment/lapse-2015-modeling-post-level/#sthash.W9lERSls.dpbs, but you can read this valuable appendix copied here in this issue to see how to build a PM step-by-step using your data and the R programming language. We thank Richard Xu, Dihui Lai, Minyu Cao, Scott Rushing, and Tim Rozar for their excellent paper and the Society of Actuaries, for the permission to reprint this portion of the paper.

Description: Rising drug—and, to a lesser extent, health care—costs in Canada are creating long-term challenges for not only governments and employers across Canada but for individuals as well, with no easy answers.