Mirror Mirror on the Wall: Asset Prices and Wall Street
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Before I became a geometer and after I studied economics, I worked as a pricing actuary for a reinsurance firm. Insurance companies aggressively market their products and in the process accumulate more risk than they can stomach. They offload this risk to heavily-capitalized reinsurance firms whose entire business is to bear such tail risks and for which they get compensated in the form of ceded premium. The job of the pricing actuary is easy: Compute the expected loss and add on a risk premium for the value-at-risk. Value-at-risk is the largest loss you would have to bear, say, once in a hundred years. Reinsurance pricing is relatively straightforward because the underlying shocks are exogenous and independent of each other. Because you are insuring only against acts of God, the probabilities are relatively stable. It's all quite tame.
Mirror Mirror on the Wall: Asset Prices and Wall Street
Mirror Mirror on the Wall: Asset Prices and…
Mirror Mirror on the Wall: Asset Prices and Wall Street
Before I became a geometer and after I studied economics, I worked as a pricing actuary for a reinsurance firm. Insurance companies aggressively market their products and in the process accumulate more risk than they can stomach. They offload this risk to heavily-capitalized reinsurance firms whose entire business is to bear such tail risks and for which they get compensated in the form of ceded premium. The job of the pricing actuary is easy: Compute the expected loss and add on a risk premium for the value-at-risk. Value-at-risk is the largest loss you would have to bear, say, once in a hundred years. Reinsurance pricing is relatively straightforward because the underlying shocks are exogenous and independent of each other. Because you are insuring only against acts of God, the probabilities are relatively stable. It's all quite tame.