Fidelity & Guaranty Life’s FIA sales doubled in fiscal 2014
Harbinger's CEO and chairman, Philip Falcone (in photo) will resign Dec. 1, to focus on HC2 Holdings and Harbinger Capital Partners. He will depart with a bonus of $20.5...
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Competitiveness of U.S. public equity markets called ‘weak’
U.S. share of global IPOs by foreign companies sits at 9.0%, continuing the trend of foreign companies avoiding U.S. equity markets. This measure remains far below the average...
QLACs: The ‘Greek yogurt’ of Retirement Products?
Longevity annuities were the topic of a two-hour discussion at the Brookings Institution two weeks ago and of a RIIA/New York Life webinar this week. Having read the transcript...
Going Dutch, with a DB-DC Hybrid
Can the use of "buffers" in collectively-managed defined contribution funds offer defined benefit-like income predictability? In the Netherlands, where pensions are a passion, a team of business, academic and...
Will a Robo-Advisor Eat Your Lunch?
"It comes down to this: ‘How much personalized service am I willing to give up to save 75 basis points a year?” said Jack Waymire about the robo-advisors. He...
AIG Offers First Qualified Longevity Annuity Contract
“ will take a while to get going,” said Stan Haithcock, of Stantheannuityman.com, “but once people realize that it lets them reduce their RMDs, and...
Banks Earn Record First-Half Annuity Income
Second-quarter 2014 annuity commissions reached $916.8 million, the second-highest quarterly mark on record, according to the Michael White Bank Annuity Fee Income Report.
“Neuromarketing” research can improve participant communications
“Rather than warn how important saving for a pension is, we should emphasize how people who save can enjoy their pension later on," said Joyce Vonken, a marketing intelligence...
Fall Issue of The Journal of Retirement Appears
Here's a list of the eight articles in the current issue, along with abstracts of their content. The featured authors include Moshe Milevsky of York University and CANNEX, David...
RetirePreneur: Steven Saltzman
Steven Saltzman is the founder of Saltzman Associates, a consultancy that works with marketers, institutional distributors and insurance underwriters.
American Equity Has ‘Big Mo’ in Agent FIA Sales
“We weren’t surprised by the ranking,” Kirby Wood, chief marketing officer at American Equity Investment Life, told RIJ regarding the results of the Cogent Reports Fixed Indexed Annuity...
Nobelist Bill Sharpe Talks about Investing
Near the close of this interview with Sharpe, which was published last week in AdvisorPerspectives, the Nobelist mentioned that one of his favorite publications is Retirement Income Journal... though...
The Missing Participant
An arena should exist where participants can express their opinions or preferences about plan design, investment options and perhaps even the amount of match they’d like to see. Sounds...
2014: ‘A Year of Cautious Optimism’
"This is one of those time periods where the stuff in the middle has surprised by not performing in-between the stuff on the ends," writes West Coast market philosopher...
Half a Trillion is Still a Big Deficit
"If the next 20 years are similar to the last five, with very slow growth and median incomes declining, then the budget deficit will grow inexorably larger and Social...
The Fed Trap
The Fed's assumption that the so-called “wealth effect”—when asset appreciation spurs real economic activity—will hasten a true post-crisis recovery isn't producing the desired results, writes the former Morgan Stanley...
What’s Up, Heterodox?
Heterodox economics, though valid and perhaps even more intellectually honest than orthodox economics, has lost its political battles, and that has made all the difference.
RetirePreneur: Jack Sharry
Jack Sharry is a principal and executive vice president of strategic development at LifeYield LLC, a developer of software to help financial advisors and investors achieve optimal after-tax returns...
Lew Minsky Talks about ‘Auto-Portability’
Lew Minsky is executive director of the Defined Contribution Institutional Investment Association, an organization of retirement plan providers and asset managers. We asked him about the automatic plan-to-plan transfer...
Goin’ to Kansas City
In search of answers to big economic questions, I'll attend the 12th International Post-Keynesian Conference at the University of Missouri next week, before heading to Williamsburg, Va., for the...
