Description: Discussion of solvency problems and the actuary's role in addressing them in the life insurance industry.

Description: A discussion of life insurance securitizations and how they can be structured to provide surplus relief associated with onerous reserve requirements.

Description: A discussion of the possible effort required and impacts resulting from the implementation of C3 Phase II for establishing risk-based capital for variable annuities. This article will describe practical considerations gleaned from actual valuation calculations recently performed by a consulting firm.

Description: This article gives an overview of the CFO Forum diversification paper. The key points that the CFO Forum made are: 1. The lack of sufficient diversifying strategies for risk management needs to be addressed. Therefore they provided a policy framework that promotes sound risk measurement and management practices in a way that can be implemented and supervised with confidence. 2. The lack of sufficient regulatory over-site needs to be addressed, so they presented a set of core principles to form the basis of European insurance regulation. These core principle incorporate diversification in a consistent manner.

Description: Under non-Aristotelian logic, there are multiple values, or shades of gray. Indeed, there may even be unexpected results from logical combinations, like “both” and “neither.” This article discusses how this insight should be applied to the current debate between formula-driven reserves with limited assumption flexibility and the reserve principles approach. For reserve standards, we do need both actuarial judgment grounded in reserving principles and restrictive formula methods or safe harbors.

Description: The SEC recently approved a financial disclosure rule mandating that a company must release material and market-moving information to all investors simultaneously. This article looks at the new rule designed to make financial disclosure fairer for all investors and how it may pose problems for larger insurers, while it may level the playing field for smaller insurers.

Description: This article is about junk assets. Insurance companies own over one third of the junk assets in the U.S. which has raised concerns and caused certain states to enact laws or regulations regarding junk investments.