Description: Read the September 2020 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: Note from the Council Corner providing an update to our JRMS members on recent / upcoming activities.

Description: The article provides an update on the 2019 ERM Symposium with regard to date, location and content (General Sessions and Concurrent Sessions).

Description: Note from Editor introducing the articles in this issue.

Description: Many ERM programs fail to include an active step of actual risk treatment and are therefore rightfully characterized as Entertainment Systems. Real ERM will use risk assessment to drive decisions about risk acceptance and risk mitigation. Entertainment systems use risk assessment to create reports and to hold discussions. No actions are taken often because ERM is not empowered to do anything.

Description: This article provides a very high level overview of accelerated underwriting programs and their history in the US marketplace. It then discusses setting up an actuarial control cycle for such products and some items related to risk management that are helpful in this setting. Pros and cons of retrospective studies, random holdouts, targeted holdouts and post issue analysis are discussed. A mathematical example of how to estimate the mortality impact of such programs from early emerging experience is provided.

Description: Could it be that the depth of our current crisis is related to our failure to find an economic goal other than continuous “growth” as it’s been measured for decades? As painful as it may be, we can view the current crisis as a wake-up call. Rather than trying desperately to restore a “healthy” economy, perhaps it’s time to try building a truly healthy economy – one where we don’t keep promoting consumption of any and all kinds at the expense of saving and investing for the future.

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.