AIG Suing Partner in ‘Life Settlement’ Investments – WSJ.
The life-settlements market suffered during the 2008 financial crisis when lending dried up for hedge funds. While many other investment markets have since recovered, the life-settlements market has remained depressed as life expectancies used by investors to gauge potential returns have repeatedly proved wrong; many people who sold their policies are living longer than investors anticipated.
The Financial Risk of Living a Long Time
People nearing the end of their careers can potentially lose 5% to 10% of their retirement wealth, or the equivalent of 2 to 5 years’ labor, by failing to annuitize their savings or annuitizing too early, according to an estimate by Alessandro Previtero of Ivey Business School in Canada. By providing a guaranteed income for life, an annuity is essentially an insurance policy against outliving one’s retirement savings. In a study, Previtero found that when stocks are rising, people are less likely to purchase annuities offered by their employers.
This excerpt came through my RSS reader this morning. As an insurance guy, naturally I was interested. When I clicked on the link to take me to the original Harvard Business Review blog article I got a 404. So I went to Google and found the article linked below.
No, I will not speculate on the reasons why HBR took their post down. Read the article and let your imagination roam.
“The job of the leader isn’t just to make decisions, it’s to make sense.”
John Seely Brown
The Scary Charts in Mish’s article paint a vivid picture of where this country and economy are headed. It’s not a pretty picture.
It’s Official: The Boomerang Kids Won’t Leave – NYTimes.com.
One in five people in their 20s and early 30s is currently living with his or her parents. And 60 percent of all young adults receive financial support from them. That’s a significant increase from a generation ago, when only one in 10 young adults moved back home and few received financial support. The common explanation for the shift is that people born in the late 1980s and early 1990s came of age amid several unfortunate and overlapping economic trends. Those who graduated college as the housing market and financial system were imploding faced the highest debt burden of any graduating class in history. Nearly 45 percent of 25-year-olds, for instance, have outstanding loans, with an average debt above $20,000. (Kasinecz still has about $60,000 to go.) And more than half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed, meaning they make substandard wages in jobs that don’t require a college degree. According to Lisa B. Kahn, an economist at Yale University, the negative impact of graduating into a recession never fully disappears. Even 20 years later, the people who graduated into the recession of the early ’80s were making substantially less money than people lucky enough to have graduated a few years afterward, when the economy was booming.
Read the entire article for a lesson in how to put a positive spin on our new Culture of Dependency. Watch the slideshow of a dose of reality. Then read the reader comments and decide for yourself if this “new and permanent life stage” is truly a “potentially thrilling economic evolution”.
Or not.
Organic Cat Litter Chief Suspect In Nuclear Waste Accident : The Two-Way : NPR.
“It was the wrong kitty litter,” says James Conca, a geochemist in Richland, Wash., who has spent decades in the nuclear waste business.
It turns out there’s more to cat litter than you think. It can soak up urine, but it’s just as good at absorbing radioactive material.
W21.11XA: Struck by baseball bat, initial encounter.
W21.03XA; struck by baseball, initial encounter.
In an effort to push specificity to the limit, some ICD-10 codes have gotten silly. Codes exist for being hurt at the opera (Y92253), walking into a lamppost (Y92253), walking into a second lamppost (W2202XD), getting sucked into a jet engine (V97.33XD), and being burned due to water skis on fire (V91.07XD).
But this is not the Achilles heel of the ICD-10.
First, medical practices and hospitals must know and have all of these 68 thousand codes readily available to add to the medical record in order to bill correctly and hope to be paid.
via Articles: The October Surprise that Could Cripple the Practice of Medicine.
Transamerica Life Insurance will lay off 70 in St. Petersburg | Tampa Bay Times.
The article does not include any details.
I’ll only add that institutions are defined by their people. As the full-time and tenured faculty become a smaller share of the employees of the institution and the professional administrators become a larger share, the nature and character of the institution inevitably changes. In this case, colleges and universities have become less about faculty, teaching, and research, and more about the provision of professional services to students and faculty. As far as I know, this shift was not planned or chosen, and the costs and benefits of such a shift were not analyzed in advance. It just happened.
via CONVERSABLE ECONOMIST: Administrators and Part-Timers: Changes in U.S. Higher Education Workforce.
$700 or $915 per credit hour, depending on degree.
The numbers above are pulled directly from a university website. The campus sits just a mile from my house. The work is part time and I don’t qualify for either pay level. To work part time teaching at a university you need a minimum of a Masters degree. So someone who busts their butt to earn a Doctorate can make $915.00 per credit hour.
I’m speechless.
Just shut the damned thing off!
lifeunderwriter.net 
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