Finite reinsurance: a strange and sometimes manipulative thing

Thanks to AIG, the weird and wonderful world of finite reinsurance has come under broader scrutiny recently. (You may recall that a finite reinsurance policy between AIG and Gen Re was the method used to inflate AIG's earnings in the case that came to the courts in 2008.)

Now, thanks to the Big Picture, further amusing documents have achieved more general publication. I don't agree with much of the thrust of the post - which frankly contains altogether too much credit derivatives related hysteria. But the extra light on finite reinsurance is welcome.

When is finite reinsurance a valid business tool, and when does it verge on fraud? This is difficult to answer because finite reinsurance is a very sophisticated tool that can be used in myriad ways. But let me illustrate a good and a bad situation.

Good finite reinsurance. Suppose a company has a liability with a known size but uncertain timing. Asbestos-related claims are a commonly cited example: the firms knows it will have to pay workers for past exposure to asbestos, and it can estimate the size of those claims reasonably well, but it does not know when the claims will be presented as the sickness has a long and uncertain gestation period. The uncertainy thus created weighs on the share price, even though the company has every intention of paying and the resources to do so. Therefore it purchases a finite reinsurance policy whereby it pays a premium equal to (roughly) the present value of the expected claims to a large, well capitalised reinsurer. The reinsurer takes two risks: one small (that the claims will be larger than expected: this is unlikely as typically the risks insured under finite schemes have rather little uncertainty in claims); and one larger (that the claims will be presented earlier than expected, and hence the invested premium will not have grown sufficiently for them to make a profit). From this we see that finite schemes are often about transferring timing or investment risk rather than the risk of uncertainty in claims.

Bad finite reinsurance. Consider the effect of the scheme above though. Before the reinsurance, the firm had a known hit to earnings in the future but with uncertain timing. Afterwards, it has a stream of expenses - the premium payment or payments on the policy - but no uncertainty. Earnings have been smoothed. Clearly we can extend that effect more broadly via policies which pay out money in the future for an appearance of risk reduction today (buying surplus for an insurer, i.e. flattering their capital position) but where all of the risk comes back in later years, or via policies which move current profits into later years, smoothing earnings. Accounting rules do not permit you to arbitrarily reserve whatever amount of current earnings you like against some future risk, especially a very unlikely and hard to quantify one, but finite reinsurance policies achieve the same effect.

Finite reinsurance can therefore be used, quasi-legally, to manipulate earnings for many companies. It can also be used to manipulate insurance companies' capital position. If ever there was an area of finance crying out for better regulation, I'd say it was insurance.

MTM

MTM means for course `mark to me'. It appears that AIG has determined the most reliable source of fair values for some transactions is -- itself. Think of a number. Wow, the number I just thought of was ... the number I was thinking of. I must be right.

I exaggerate of course. Let Bloomberg take up the story:

AIG swaps not covered by the government program include guarantees on $249.9 billion of corporate loans and residential mortgages, most of them made by banks in Europe...
[These swaps] are different because they didn’t insure against losses... they were bought to take advantage of European accounting rules that allow the banks to use the swaps to reduce the capital they’re required to set aside as loss reserves.

The swaps are kept in place only until new accounting rules, known as Basel II, are phased in. Those rules eliminate the ability of financial institutions to reduce the capital they need to set aside by buying swaps.

[AIG has] unwound $95 billion of these regulatory-capital swaps without any losses as of the end of the third quarter. And Gerry Pasciucco, hired from Morgan Stanley on Nov. 12 as interim chief operating officer of AIG’s financial-products subsidiary, said the company continues to “experience early terminations according to our schedule at par.”

As a result, Lewis [AIG risk officer] said, even if the assets underlying the remaining swaps fall in value, AIG isn’t required to mark them to lower market levels.

That’s because, as the insurer said in its third-quarter filing, it “estimates the fair value of these derivatives by considering observable market transactions.” And the only relevant transactions are the swaps AIG has successfully unwound with the European banks, according to the filing.

There is more to trouble an AIG investor, European bank regulators, the SEC, the FED, and AIG's auditors in this, if it's true, than you can shake a stick. Here are a few of the issues.

Firstly you would have thought that the Gen Re case had taught AIG that doing transaction purely for regulatory manipulation without risk transfer is a bad idea.

Secondly, what do European bank regulators think of this? (I'll leave Basel 2 being described as an accounting standard as a signal that this new item may not be entirely reliable. And while we are asking questions, where exactly in Europe hasn't Basel 2 been implemented yet? And what is a default swap that does not transfer losses, and how exactly does it qualify for capital relief?)

Thirdly, if both the transaction and AIG's accounting for it are correctly described, why on earth do their auditors, PWC I think, let them get away with this? Hasn't AIG had enough auditing issues at AIG FP already?

Fourthly does the FED really want an almost 80% state owned company doing this kind of transaction? And accounting for it this way?

Timing risk and finite reinsurance

One of the murkier parts of the reinsurance world is finite reinsurance. Even finding a good definition is difficult. But here, rather than surveying the whole topic, I want to discuss one particular application, namely hedging timing risk.

The typical situation this arises is where there either may or will certainly be claims on an insurance policy over an extended period, but their timing is uncertain and their maximum size is bounded. Suppose for instance we know that over the next ten years we will very likely have to pay out claims of £10M, but we do not know when these claims will be presented. This risk can cause significant earnings volatility: in years with no claims, our earnings look great, but if £8M or £9M of the £10M arrive all in one year, things will look less good for that year.

This earnings volatility can be hedged (for a price). Typically we transfer some assets, say £8M worth, to a reinsurer: these assets are invested. Simultaneously they write us a reinsurance policy capped at £10M on the risk, and receive a small premium to be thought of as an asset management fee. If claims arrive very early in the policy the reinsurer can lose money as the £8M will probably not have grown to £10M in the first couple of years. If the claims happen late, they make money as the assets will have grown to be worth more than £10M over eight or nine years if prudently managed. The reinsurer therefore takes some timing risk and some investment performance risk, but not much. It is a very large very well capitalised entity so it can handle the earning volatility much better than the ceding insurer.

There is even the possibility of passing some upside of good investment management and/or good claims management back to the ceding insurer via an experience account: for instance if the £8M has grown to £12M before claims of £9M leaving £3M at the end of ten years, then this could be split 50/50 between the reinsurer and the ceding insurer. With careful structuring this can mean that it is possible to transfer very little risk with a finite reinsurance policy yet achieve the desired aim of smoothing earnings, i.e. an accounting arbitrage.

This kind of technology emphasises that insurance can act as a form of capital. Without the policy, the ceding insurer would have to support the earnings volatility with equity. With it in place, capital requirements are reduced. The reinsurer is better placed to take the timing risk than the primary insurer and hence a deal is possible which makes sense for both parties.