Writes anonymously on the political economy of British professional services.
Insurance
The new wave of debt conversions replaces taxpayer-backed guarantees with commercial insurance and philanthropic first-loss capital. The arithmetic has to give somewhere — and it will not be the investor's spread.
Insurance
Why the annuity industry's entry into housing is not an investment story but a constitutional one — and why the matching adjustment, not ownership share, is where the risk lives.
Insurance
Amanda Blanc says insurers stand ready to fund Britain's new towns. Read the small print, and the offer is to book the margin privately and leave the risk on the public's books.
Government
What the triple lock actually is, what it isn’t, and why both sides of the debate keep arguing about the wrong thing
Government
What public-sector pensions are really worth — and why almost nobody counts
Engineering
How actuarial software vendors sell a graphics-card number they can't deliver on the models that actually matter
Insurance
How the argument progresses "The asset behind the counterparty" — thirteen steps in three movements: the value machine onshore, the risk crossing offshore, and the rating asked to catch it. Click any step to expand the reasoning behind it. Expand all Collapse all Movement I — the value machine, onshore
Insurance
CP8/26 tightens the capital cedants hold against their funded reinsurance counterparties. But counterparty strength, for a funded re vehicle, is largely a function of the asset pool behind it — and that is the risk the regime still reaches only indirectly.
Insurance
How the Treasury was told, in writing, that its pension reforms would raise the probability of insurer failure by a fifth — and proceeded anyway.
Insurance
Every financial structure is a set of relationships: who contributes, who collects, who can leave. In the bulk annuity market, the parties contributing most — the pensioners — cannot negotiate, cannot exit, and were never sent a bill to refuse.
Insurance
A working guide to the actual calculation of the matching adjustment and the fundamental spread — the projection, the equivalent yield, the deduction, and the four places where judgement enters. With worked figures throughout.
Insurance
Britain's corporate pension promises are migrating, at £40–50 billion a year, onto insurance balance sheets built around one contested number. The supervisor said the number was wrong and was overruled.