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#225 | Making Sense of MassMutual’s Whole Life Price Increase
A couple of weeks ago, MassMutual announced that it would be increasing premiums on its Legacy 10 and Legacy 12 Pay products by about 10%, on average. The announcement went on to say that: Guaranteed cash values will not change…
#224 | The Tangled Reinsurance Web – Part 5 – The Power of Coinsurance
The tension between growth and capital is as old as time, but it takes on a unique dimension for life insurers. Most businesses view capital as a cushion to ride out temporary setbacks in the core business or to fund…
#223 | The Tangled Reinsurance Web – Part 4 – Coinsurance and Capital
As we’ve already seen, the power of coinsurance is that a life insurer can essentially borrow the economics of another life insurer within the defined confines of the reinsurance treaty. It’s not unlike what John and Jeremy, the protagonists of…
#222 | An Independent View of AG 49
One of the funny things about regulatory proceedings is that nothing happens – and then everything happens very, very quickly. The process to update AG 49 in light of growing market for Leveraged IUL has certainly followed this pattern. Back…
#221 | Reconciling FIA and IUL
One of the curious things about the life insurance industry is how little crossover there is between the life insurance side and the annuity side in terms of advisors, brokerages and even life insurers. Most agents who do significant volume…
#220 | The Tangled Reinsurance Web – Part 3 – Coinsurance
For all of its subtleties, coinsurance is exactly what it sounds like – co-insurance. Both the direct writer and the reinsurer are on the hook for the liability, the reserves and the capital in proportion to the coinsurance agreement. But,…
#219 | The Tangled Reinsurance Web – Part 2 – YRT
If life insurance companies are a prism struck by white light, which represents the combined risks embedded in each policy they sell, then reinsurers specialize in particular parts of the light spectrum splaying out on the wall behind the prism.…
#218 | The Tangled Reinsurance Web – Part 1
COVID-19 has certainly changed a lot of things and one of them is that, for the first time in a long time, the question of mortality risk exposure for life insurers is suddenly on the table. This might seem like…
#217 | Nothing is Real and Everything is Possible
This July will mark my 13th year in the life insurance industry and, although it’s not the nice, round number that usually gets people thinking about the passage of time, for whatever reason I’ve found myself stopping to think about…
#216 | The Lesson of Theranos and Madoff
Over the past couple of months, I’ve knocked out 4 books that were equal parts fascinating and disturbing. They are windows into the capacity for humans to deceive and, even more importantly, the capacity for humans to believe – even…
