Description: This is a book review of 'Mastering Operational Risk'. The book offers a high level review of the risk management process based on the banking industry. The target audience is someone interested in understanding their company's operational risk framework.

Description: This article is a recap of the 2010 ERM symposium and the paper awards.

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: The problem facing risk distributors is that product pricing is sticky, whereas the market price of risk can be quite volatile. This disconnection can become particularly severe during market downturns. The problem facing risk insurers is maintaining market share in benign market conditions when the market price of risk is low. Strategies that are dynamic with respect to time are difficult in practice, since they require more capital in volatile markets.

Description: This is the SOA website page displaying the table of contents for Risk Management: The Current Financial Crisis, Lessons Learned and Future Implications series of essays.

Description: What risks should ERM actuaries be working on?

Description: In this article the author discusses the many hats an actuary wears and how risk management comes to play in each one. The roles discussed: 1. Pricing actuary. 2. Catastrophe modeling actuary. 3. Ceding reinsurance actuary. 4. Corporate actuary. 5. Loss reserving actuary. 6. Predictive modeling actuary. 7. Marketing actuary. 8. Underwriting actuary. 9. Investment actuary.

Description: This article is about the annual call for ERM-related research papers that present the very latest in ERM thinking and move forward principles-based approaches. The call discussed in this article was issued in October 2005 and attracted nearly 30 entrants, from which there was one winner and eight more that were selected for presentation at the 2006 ERM symposium. They were listed in the article and can be found, along with the 20 other entrants on the ERM Symposium Web site at: www.ermsymposium.org.

Description: The focus of this article is that while Economic Capital can be a valuable component of the ERM process for insurance companies, an over-emphasis on EC, to the point of neglect of other steps in the ERM process, can reduce the effectiveness of an ERM program.

Description: In this article, the editor talks about the contents of this issue of the Risk Management Newsletter. Also mentioned are the three categories the newsletter tries to cover 1. Risk Identification, 2. Risk Response, and 3. Risk Culture & Disclosures.