Description: Annuities are presenting ever-greater risks for the direct writers: • Variable annuities with guaranteed minimum and enhanced death benefits and income benefits • Fixed annuities with multi-year rate guarantees are capital intensive • In-force structured settlements have asset portfolios with declining investment yields • The impact to the payout annuity market from lengthening life expectancies From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Volume 27, No. 3, Session 146 PD of the New Orleans Annual Meeting

Description: Panel discusses securitization as a popular method for improving returns and clearing up balance sheets. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 23, No. 3., Session 74 PD of the Washington Annual Meeting

Description: An overview of reinsurance training class provided to the Bermuda Monetary Authority (Authority) and Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago (Central Bank) covering all aspects of reinsurance. Article also provides an overview of initiatives that the two regulators (Authority and Central Bank) are involved with.

Description: Given all the noise surrounding the topic of avian influenza today, how can actuaries distill the mass of information—which is often conflicting—into the critical questions to raise and explore within their own organizations?

Description: discussion of the capital management alternatives for funding the additional reserves required due to Actuarial Guideline XXX

Description: Evan and Brad interview Larry Moews, Chief Actuary and Risk Officer of SCOR. The discussion focuses on Larry's insights and experiences in Risk Management.

Description: This abstract describes a paper that studies the optimal reinsurance problem when risk is measured by a general risk measure. It is demonstrated that there is a “stable optimal retention” that will show no sensitivity, insofar as it will solve the optimal reinsurance problem for many risk measures, thus providing a very robust reinsurance plan.

Description: Reinsurance reduces the required capital of the primary insurer but increases that of the reinsurer. Capital is costly. All capital costs, including that of the insurer and the reinsurer, are ultimately borne by primary policyholders. Reducing the total capital of insurers and reinsurers brings down the total capital cost and the total primary policy premium. A reinsurance arrangement is considered optimal—if it minimizes the total required capital. This optimal reinsurance is an attracting equilibrium under price competition. Evidence suggests an inverse relationship between the total required capital and the correlation between the losses held by different insurers and reinsurers. Examples are constructed to examine this and other properties of the optimal reinsurance.

Description: This article presents an FAQ on protected cell companies. From Reinsurance Section News, November 2007, Issue No. 61.

Description: In this session 116 PD of the New York Annual Meeting the panel discusses factors which led to the development of alternative risk transfer transactions in the property and casualty markets, and review techniques used to transfer and trade insurance risks within the capital markets. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 24, No. 3.