Insurance
The Shibboleth Premium
Why the bulk annuity industry pays a fortune to avoid a fortnight of training
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Insurance
Four-fifths of 2008: what the ECB's private credit stress test actually says
The industry read the ECB's special feature as reassurance. Read in the original, it dismantles the two defences the sector relies on — and raises the subprime comparison itself. By Johan Landman.
Insurance
Whose favour is it anyway? Debt-for-nature and the privatised guarantee
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
Property companies wearing pensioners as armour
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
Patient Capital, Public Risk
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.
Insurance
BPA
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
The asset behind the counterparty
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
The Overruled Objection
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
The Missing Invoice
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
How the Number Is Built
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
The Profession That Welcomed It
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.
Insurance
Outsourcing to Yourself
The fees buried inside offshore life reinsurance are growing because the structure is doing exactly what it was built to do. We can be confident of that, because we have watched the same thing happen before — and, once, watched a regulator stop it.