Description: Chronically low interest rates are a reflection of macroeconomic trends. Care must be exercised in making assumptions regarding mean reversion.

Description: The Committee on Economic Statistics of the Canadian Institute of Actuaries has recommended that the Institute sponsor an Economic Forecasting Board composed of actuaries and economists. Its role would be to develop formal projections of interest rates, inflation rates, productivity and wages. This article discusses the role of such a board, the purposes for the projections, and the potential roadblocks to accomplishing this.

Description: Discusses the influences that foreign economies have on the U.S. economy and the risks that those influences create for the U.S. life insurance industry.

Description: The author notes that “many considerations enter into the determination of investment strategy. Important among these considerations is the maximization of investment income on an after-tax basis rather than on a before-tax basis.” The article then discusses how starting in the early 1960’s insurers, using a marginal tax rate approach, invested heavily in tax exempt bonds. The author, expressing his belief that a major depression is likely to occur in the next 10 years, recommends insurance companies divest of their holding in tax exempt instruments, based on the macroeconomic analysis he presents.

Description: This article summarizes the responses of nine readers who answered The Actuary’s April Query, on the assertion by two Harvard economists that government deficits are being exaggerated unless allowance is made for the declining value of the dollar.

Description: The author discusses the review of a recent 2001 Wall Street Journal’s semiannual survey of economists’ forecasts, starting by asking if there is a simple way to summarize the results and to extract a consensus forecast, and from this extraction, determine when an individual forecast is significantly different from that of the consensus.This article is reprinted with permission. It last ran in the Jan. 10, 2001 issue of The La Jolla Economics newsletter.

Description: Chronically low interest rates are a reflection of macroeconomic trends. Care must be exercised in making assumptions regarding mean reversion.

Description: Latin America has acquired an economically strategic importance in the process of globalization that it did not have a decade ago. The region has attracted significant attention and investment by the international insurance industry. This article explores some issues related to the growth in supply of insurance companies capacity, the relatively slower pace of growth in consumer demand for their products, and the factors that companies can identify in forming their strategies to achieve their objectives.

Description: Overview on current trends in medical practice impacting the LTC insurance business with a focus on dementia, risk stratification, and predictive modeling.