The aporetic financialisation of insurance liabilities
Reserving under Solvency II
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4495202 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Charalampos Fytros (University of Piraeus, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 20-39 |
| Publication date | 2021-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Finance and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2059-5999 • E-ISSN: 2059-5999 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2218/finsoc.v7i1.5589 |
| OpenAlex | W3159570740 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 28 |
The valuation of insurance liabilities has traditionally been dealt with by actuaries, who closely monitored underlying illiquid features, assumed a long-term perspective, and exercised their own subjective, expert judgment. However, the new EU regulatory regime of Solvency II (S2) has come to require market-consistent valuation supplemented by a risk-sensitive capital. This is considered an unwanted shift towards short-termism that is misaligned with the industry's long term and countercyclical character. The new principles place the 'technicalising' logic of financial economics over 'contextualising' actuarial know-how. Following existing analytics of valuation from the ethnography of reinsurance markets and the social studies of finance, such requirements appear either as an alarming attack against the actuarial component of traditional valuation practice, or else as a preserver of it, through a process of enfolding at the heart of the financialisation project. This article holds that the case of S2 challenges both these analytics of valuation. S2's financialisation project, precisely by attempting to construct itself, deconstructs itself into an actuarial project, in a recurring, aporetic process. In this respect, fair (or otherwise) valuation remains always undecidable, inconclusive, and thus responsible
Actuarial science · Business · Economics · Financial system · Market liquidity · Monetary economics · Solvency · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism
The Economics, Regulation, and Systemic Risk of Insurance Markets
The Provoked Economy
An Engine, Not a Camera
Aporias of Security
The Price of an Uncertain Promise
Radical hermeneutics
An Equation and its Worlds
An Introduction to Market Devices
Epistemic Cultures
The actuary as fallen hero
The Mangle of Practice
The structures of uncertainty
On the performative power of financial models
Market technologies and the pragmatics of prices
Catastrophe risk
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,5 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2022 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |