Description: Insurance company financial reporting and performance measurement are going through a significant transformation. Insurers are beginning to look at their business based on what many refer to as the “economic value framework.” Under this framework insurance companies determine the economic value of the capital invested in their business and the economic value of earnings to derive a risk-adjusted return on capital. Standard setters, primarily European insurance regulators through Solvency II and the International Accounting Standards Board through IFRS Phase II, propose adopting many of these concepts for solvency and performance reporting.

Description: Here we are led to draw a distinction between “wild” markets and “free” markets. A wild market is unregulated and unscrutinized. Information flows are purposely impeded for competitive reasons and reduced to trickles from rumor and espionage. No one knows what anyone else is doing, and pricing is blind and haphazard. In such a market, there are no safeguards against anticompetitive behavior and no guarantees that the market will clear. The only guarantee is that there will be liquidity crises.

Description: Since solvency assessment depends on a financial reporting framework, one needs risk metrics for use in financial reporting. The essay argues that conceptually, the cost of capital is the appropriate metric for reserves, while a probability level is the appropriate metric for capital. Then the essay advocates stress testing on specific scenarios as a better practical approach to ORSA.

Description: U.K. life insurers writing participating business have, since the end of 2004, been required by their regulator, the Financial Services Authority FSA, to value their assets and liabilities on a market-consistent basis. The purpose of this paper is to explain the new valuation approach based on market-consistent values and its rationale set out the issues faced by life insurers in implementing the new regime and explain how these issues have been addressed by insurers.

Description: The paper explores developments through 2006 in the application of market-consistent concepts to the measurement of fair values of liabilities for financial reporting purposes.