GLG News by Actuaries

Uncertainty breeds panic among people who seek to quantify risk, whether they do so judgmentally or with complex, elaborate "predictive risk models."  There is a dislocation taking place among the world's economies and the markets are simply struggling to quantify the meaning of the structural...

This article addresses issues about Florida Property Insurance that are important to policyholders, insurers, and the general public.  The basic thrust of my comments are to outline important actions for the state and the insurance regulators to take, and to explain why heavy regulation of insurance...

What Freddie Mac is doing now is supposed to do 3 years ago (a call from Allen Greenspan in May 2005), specifically to liquidate substantially with little disruption to the housing market in 2005.  The call from Allen Greenspan came at the time when the combined holdings (of mortgages and mortgage...

Wachovia follows what it takes to do right things to correct the pitfalls.

The characteristics of Nonstandard Auto insurance listed in this article are well known, and one can find information at the Casualty Actuarial Society website www.casact.org by entering a search string such as “nonstandard auto”.   Any business entering this market must understand the effect...

The United States has very limited price transparency for medical providers and facilities. The lack of price transparency artificially raises costs in the United States because there is very little price competition for services.  This is true even in areas where there is excess capacity.

Contingent commissions, if not disclosed, can result in brokerage clients not knowing how much they are paying for the services they receive from their risk brokers. A commission should be viewed as just an alternative to fee-based consulting.  In theory the amount of commissions received should...

If a book of reinsurance business can be purchased for a price that rpresents the present value of estimated future cash flows of that book, it could be a preferred way to buy market share, given that the price of growing in the reinsurance business can include quoting new accounts at less-than-break-even...

If thorough due diligence work is performed, investors could benefit from consolidation due to the benefits of diversification.   A combination of companies  focusing on different  lines  would either free up capital  for other purposes or  lead to a financially stronger...

Now that Florida is retaining a much larger portion of their more predictable catastrophe losses, insurers and reinsurers should be able to buy the high layer coverage they want at affordable prices.  The risk load charged for this high layer coverage would be significantly less than the risk load...