Description: The Society of Actuaries Research Institute’s Aging and Retirement Strategic Research Program is pleased to release a collection of essays addressing the impact of inflation on retirement and retirement-related issues.

Description: This is a collection of essays from the Society of Actuaries Research Institute, focusing on the potential impact of AI on human longevity and its consequences for modeling future survival/mortality. It includes various essays discussing AI's role in mortality modeling, life expectancy, and implications for actuarial methods.

Description: This is a collection of essays from the Society of Actuaries Research Institute, focusing on the potential impact of AI on human longevity and its consequences for modeling future survival/mortality. It includes various essays discussing AI's role in mortality modeling, life expectancy, and implications for actuarial methods.

Description: With the possible exception of full faith and credit debts of the United States, every loan carries some risk with it regardless of the borrower, and this risk varies depending on the creditworthiness of the person or institution that is supposed to repay the debt. Bearing that risk requires some sort of capital, both as a legal requirement and as evidence of good sense in lending, but recently we seem to have forgotten the basic relationship between a loan and the capital associated with it. The lesson of the current debacle is, or certainly ought to be, that the risk inherent in a financial transaction cannot be made to go away by the mere act of repackaging that transaction and renaming it.

Description: It is the belief of this author that the subprime mortgage mess was none other than a Ponzi scheme repackaged into 21st century financial engineering clothes. What makes this scheme particularly disastrous is that the 21st century Ponzi mortgages were packaged and sold to investors and then trillions of dollars of derivatives were constructed based on the underlying mortgages, magnifying the problem by orders of magnitude.

Description: The new ways of calculating capital requirements are relatively untested. We may be witnessing the results of such a test today. As of this writing, the global economy is almost surely entering a serious recession. One of the reasons for this appears to be inadequate capital provisioning. The failure of capital regimes to protect financial entities and, by extension, their customers has had unfortunate effects on the markets and economies of the world.

Description: Three drivers that are often not at the top of lists about the origins of the crisis: a At some level, every entity that handles risks should be assessing what would happen if they ended up owning the risk that they thought they would only have temporarily b The change in the real estate market that was driven by the non-marginal amount of new subprime buyers who came into the market and c Risk managers should always be aware that marginal analysis can produce incorrect results.

Description: Many call this the sub-prime crisis, but risky mortgages were simply symptomatic of the underlying excesses building through the financial system. Investors, government, lenders and borrowers were all at fault. Where did the skeptics go?

Description: Financial crises are nothing new. What is unique and sobering is the far greater speed with which the current situation has evolved from a weakening of the U.S. housing market into a full-blown, global economic meltdown. Also new this time is how quickly the fallout spread beyond the financial sector into all areas of the economy. Advanced communications and information technologies are creating an era of greater risk with more serious and far-reaching consequences when compared with even the recent past.

Description: The Society of Actuaries’ Aging and Retirement Strategic Research Program in collaboration with the International Association of Black Actuaries (IABA) and the Organization of Latino Actuaries (OLA) is pleased to release a collection of essays in response to a call for essays aimed to explore how differences in wealth and retirement outcomes are experienced by people of different races and ethnicities and to promote a better understanding of the underlying issues surrounding the differences.