Speaking at LIMRA’s Retirement Industry Conference in Orlando on April 3, an attorney-lobbyist predicted that tax incentives for insurance and retirement products will undergo scrutiny by the White House and Congress.

“Guaranteed Retirement Income Beyond Annuities,” a new white paper from Annuity Insight, a unit of Strategic Insight, Inc., offers a 137-page, 50-exhibit analysis of Standalone Living Benefits (SALBs), which are lifetime withdrawal riders unbundled from annuities and applied to select mutual fund or ETF portfolios.

In a new report, authors at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College (CRR) attempt to calculate how much it might cost to give American workers guaranteed an attractive long-term return on retirement savings invested in the stock market over a lifetime.

“The annuity industry is at a boiling point,” says NAFA executive vice president Kim O’Brien. She invited insurance producers to attend NAFA’s annual meeting and join in a “March to Capitol Hill" in Washington on May 6-8, 2009.

Mary Schapiro spent the past ten years as president of FINRA or its predecessor, NASD. During that time, FINRA dithered while two stock market bubbles and the Enron crime vaporized the savings of millions of Americans.

The immediate annuity, aka income annuity, aka "SPIA," is due for a comeback, says Garth Bernard of Retirement Income Solutions Enterprise, Inc.

Individual annuity net premiums are expected to grow to $225.2 billion in 2010 from $188.5 billion in 2007.