Description: The author uses football to demonstrate the axiom of downside risk, and how it can be applied in business situations when considering whether to use a conservative or aggressive approach.

Description: This article reviews the dynamics of surrender risk, briefly discusses current valuations in the Interest Rate option markets and presents some tailored structured hedging instruments that can be used to manage this risk.

Description: Although rate structures where low-cost cohorts subsidize high cost cohorts may be justified from a actuarial, marketing, or legal standpoint, the subsidization creates risks which must be understood and monitored. This article presents the concept of subsidization signature to measure and interpret the effects of rate subsidization, and to assess the sustainability of rating structures and the sensitivity of business mix assumptions.

Description: Panelists report on the status of activities by national associations in regard to risk-based capital requirements for health insurers. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 24, No. 2.

Description: Companies need to learn to plan for uncertainty by taking into consideration downturns, not just an environment of moderation and occasional booms.

Description: To deal with future correlation crises, the author suggests the implementation of ‘’quanlitative analysts’’ (‘Quanls’) in the enterprise risk management (ERM) process: risk managers who are able to lead interdisciplinary ERM studies from a jointly qualitative and quantitative point of view, with an emphasis on dynamics.

Description: The letter from the editor discusses some recent loss events driven by model error and provides an overview of the articles in this issue of Risk Management.

Description: An exploration of Canada’s federal regulator of financial institutions (OSFI) and its more formal assessment of the actuarial function of insurers.

Description: This paper expands upon current capital analysis by introducing a practical approach that considers the objectives of all stakeholders of an insurance company in setting appropriate capital targets. In addition, the paper introduces a technique for estimating capital adequacy that is based on mapping stochastic distributions of regulatory and rating agency capital measures to observable financial rating transition matrices.

Description: The editorial cautions that while the development of more sophisticated models may increase efficiency, it is important to consider the very real risk management costs associated with the increased complexity, efficiency and overconfidence in the predictive power of models.