Description: This article discusses the reliance the banking industry placed on sophisticated mathematical models.

Description: The roots of the crisis are understood on a simplified basis, by 3 Ls: a Lack of accountability b Leverage and c Liquidity. Historically, people requiring mortgages sought their mortgages from local institutions that would conduct the evaluation and hold the risk. Loan officers of these institutions were accountable for the outcomes of their decisions – defaults were a direct reflection on their judgment. Leverage was a second key factor. Institutions guaranteed mortgages against default. The third L, liquidity, because a problem. When property values eventually evidenced their inevitable fall, defaults occurred at historically high rates.

Description: Political figures and journalists have tended to blame deregulation and greed for the credit crisis. However, we would like to suggest that these were not the primary cause of the credit crisis. The real cause of the crisis was faulty regulation and arrogance. Flawed regulation in the over-reliance on complicated capital models and arrogance in believing that the complex mathematical formula in risk models overcame the limitations on input availability and enabled companies to capture returns that were greater than the cost of capital, have led Wall Street by creating CDOs and similar instruments to repackage risks and take out the systematic excess risk charges as profits, and have also allowed companies to run “prudently” on leverage ratios that were in hindsight over the limit.

Description: This article highlights some of the results from the Society of Actuaries SOA 2010 update to the 2005 Reflecting Risk in Pricing Survey. The survey focused on how companies are trying to price for and understand the risks inherent in the products they sell in various product lines—life and annuity, health, and property and casualty P&C insurance—and showed results for various countries of location and business focus.

Description: The U.K. Pension Protection Fund (PPF) was established in April 2005 to protect the pensions of members of U.K. private sector defined benefit pension schemes that have insufficient assets and whose corporate sponsor fails. The fund takes over the pension scheme assets and assumes responsibility for the payment of compensation to the former members of the scheme. PPF is funded by a levy on the population of eligible schemes. The elements of the enterprise risk management of the fund have been developed by reference to practice within proprietary insurance institutions and other pensions funds; their application to this unique financial vehicle is the subject of this paper. The paper draws on references to relevant risk and actuarial work. It is designed to illustrate the application of principles and techniques to a real world example.

Description: Read the March 2017 issue of Risk Management published by the Joint Risk Management Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary, articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.

Description: This article provides an overview of the commonly used structural credit risk modeling approach that is less familiar to the actuarial community.

Description: In this article, the authors discuss measuring and understanding the more holistic value of risk management. In particular, organizations are struggling with how to best determine the market value of risk management strategies.

Description: Cyber threats and their costs are a continuously evolving, moving target and a source of uncertainty.