Setting discount rates is a crucial and subjective exercise. This is true for life insurance embedded values too. Many researchers are comfortable with a range for Equity Risk Premiums of between 3% and 5%. Many corporate finance practitioners use a range from 5% to 8% or even higher. My nearly eight-year-old blog post on mis-estimating…
I have never owned Steinhoff shares. I was surprised then, when going through some old blog uploads (dealing with a separate copyright issue that I may touch on in another post) to find this share price graph of Steinhoff from 2007 I don’t remember looking at this, but the blog entry was actually about insider…
Reading the Financial Soundness Standards for Insurers (FSIs) is an exercise that can only end in madness. I’m sufficiently familiar with them now that I mostly refer back to them for particularly tricky or thorny issues. Without fail, the words fail to clearly communicate exactly what was intended. Take ancillary capital as an example. To…
I had several requests for these slides. At some point they should also be available on ASSA’s website, but that process seems to take a curiously long time. Here are the Micro insurance sessional 2018 slides for anyone interested, provided of course without warranty or guarantee at all and with the understanding that the views expressed are…
Systemic risk is risk to the “system” in some way. In the financial services world, it is often defined in one of two ways: The risk of contagion, where failure of an entity leads to distress or failures of others [micro prudential] The risk of an event that can trigger serious consequences for the real economy.…
This is part 2 of a 3 part series. Part 1 is here. Non-life claims reserves are regularly not discounted, for bad reasons and good. This part of the series looks at the related issue of inflation in claims reserving. (You’ll have to wait for part 3 for me to talk about the analysis that…
I’ve had the privilege to straddle life insurance and non-life insurance (P&C, general, short term insurance, take your pick of terms) in my career. On balance, I think having significant exposure to both has increased my knowledge in each rather than lessened the depth of my knowledge in either. I’ve been able to transport concepts…
