What Record Mortality Rates Mean For The Life Insurance Industry

—The Senate has approved President Joe Biden’ s choice of Gary Gensler to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, signaling an emphasis on investor protection for the Wall Street watchdog agency after a deregulatory stretch during the Trump administration.

The Department of Labor’s newest guidance on its investment advice rule’s exemption emphasizes that the rule does not extend a private right to sue and other conditions that rankled the industry with the Obama administration’s fiduciary rule.

In a 2017 LIMRA survey, 50% of companies that responded said they were using automated underwriting. In a similar survey in 2019, 62% of carriers said they used automated underwriting while 64% said they were using accelerated underwriting.

Madoff died at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina, apparently from natural causes, the person said. The person was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity.

John Hancock includes with each life insurance policy access to the Vitality program, a technology-based wellness program that rewards healthy habits. It’s a side of life insurance not often expressed — a light, even fun, and rewarding side.

With New York legalizing recreational marijuana, is it time for investors to jump in? There are still federal-level barriers that limit cannabis companies’ growth potential.

The direction is toward best-interest rules for annuity sales — a compromise between the tough fiduciary standard that registered investment advisors adhere to, and the suitability standard that regulators say is no longer sufficient.

Even with increased interest, there are 102 million uninsured and underinsured Americans who believe they need to buy life insurance or to increase their coverage. This represents 40% the adult population. The question is why don’t they buy?

Timothy Pfeifer of Pfeifer Advisory, which advises carriers on product design, said interest rates, regulations, tax policy and other factors are forcing companies to rethink their whole product lineup.

The state Senate passed Senate Bill 76, Property Insurance, by Sen. Jim Boyd, R-Bradenton. The legislation addresses several issues surrounding the rising cost of property insurance in Florida, Boyd said.

Police say Jimmy Lee Murphy, 32, took out a $650,000 life insurance policy on his wife weeks before her death. Whitney Murphy, 26, was killed by gunshot in October 2014.

The U.S. economy is poised for an extended period of strong growth and hiring, the chair of the Federal Reserve said in an interview broadcast Sunday, though the coronavirus still poses some risk. Chair Jerome Powell, speaking to “60 Minutes,” also said that he doesn’t expect to raise the Fed’s benchmark interest rate.

Talk of pending tax increases has some advisors busy with clients who are anxious to plan now.

Diversity is more than simply bringing more people of color into an organization, Derrik Anderson, executive director of Race Matters, said during this week’s NAIFA Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Impact Week.

Much like those who ran to California after gold was discovered, people rushing to buy Bitcoin are unlikely to discover the breathtaking fortunes found by the pioneers who came before them.

The Florida Supreme Court will hear a constitutional challenge to a 2016 state law that put new requirements on life-insurance companies to determine whether policyholders have died and to contact beneficiaries.

The life insurance industry has an opportunity to invest in underserved communities while helping remove some of the barriers to those who seek employment in the industry, executives from the American Council of Life Insurers said.

A recent Insure.com survey explores whether people delayed health care during the COVID-19 pandemic and what type of health care services they avoided. Nearly 40% of respondents reported they postponed certain health services.

The bottom line in making your company a place where women can succeed and thrive is to ask yourself whether it is a place you would want your mother, your wife or your daughter to work.

The Virginia-based insurance giant said Tuesday it has terminated its merger agreement with China Oceanwide Holdings Group Co. Ltd., a Beijing-based company that agreed in October 2016 to buy Genworth for about $2.7 billion, or $5.43 per share in cash.

The SEC alleges that actor Zachary Horwitz misappropriated investor funds for his personal use, including the purchase of his multi-million dollar home, trips to Las Vegas, and to pay a celebrity interior designer. Horwitz’s credits as an actor include low-budget features such as “Trespassers.”

Justice Stephen Breyer on Tuesday said liberal advocates of big changes at the Supreme Court, including expanding the number of justices, should think “long and hard” about what they’re proposing. Politically driven change could diminish the trust Americans place in the court, Breyer said.

A Houston woman took out two life insurance policies on her 6-year-old son before giving him lethal doses of medications and over the counter drugs that caused him frightening hallucinations before he died, prosecutors said.

President Joe Biden just proposed a roughly US $2 trillion infrastructure plan, which he ambitiously compared to the interstate highway system and the space race. He aims to pay for it solely by taxing companies more, including the first increase in the corporate tax rate.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that President Joe Biden’s more than $2 trillion infrastructure plan doesn’t go far enough and isn’t fast enough. The New York Democrat also took issue with the amount of spending, arguing that an ideal plan would cost about $10 trillion.

The race is on to vaccinate as many people as possible, but a significant number of Americans are reluctant to get the shots, even in places where they are plentiful. Twenty-five percent of Americans say they probably or definitely will not get vaccinated, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Stimulus efforts have mostly been successful, Fed researchers say. The $5 trillion in COVID-19 relief spending lawmakers have passed in the last year has far eclipsed how much they doled out during the Great Recession and in previous downturns.

A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs finds 46% of Americans overall now view the economy as good, up from the 37% who felt that way last month. Views of the economy had tanked at the onset of the pandemic in April last year, when 29% said it was in good shape.

Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren pressed President Joe Biden to include monthly payments and automatic extensions to unemployment insurance in his future recovery efforts, which are expected to cost up to $4 trillion. Kamala Harris proposed monthly COVID-19 stimulus payments of $2,000 last year, but the idea didn’t gain much traction.

What are the barriers keeping women from entering and staying in the financial services industry? One industry leader shares her experiences in identifying roadblocks and knocking them down.

Among them: a South Florida man alleged to have bought a Lamborghini for $318,000 with millions in COVID-19 relief loans; a Broward County tax preparer who purportedly pocketed huge commissions for filing $28 million worth of phony business loan applications; and a former NFL player from Miami accused of stealing identities.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken many U.S. adults’ confidence in retiring comfortably or on time, with one-in-five reporting it has forced them to delay their retirement or no longer retire at all, according to the new 2021 Tax-Efficient Retirement Income survey.

Deloitte recently released its 2021 insurance M&A outlook, which “examines trends over the past several years and identifies key expectations and challenges for 2021 that may help insurance executives pinpoint M&A drivers and plan their strategy accordingly.”

MetLife’s 19th annual U.S. Employee Benefit Trends Study finds more than half of workers in their 20s (51 percent), including Gen Z and young millennials, say their work-life balance is better now than before the pandemic, while only one-quarter of baby boomers say the same.

The White House says the president sees the next phase of his “Build Back Better” agenda as a chance to “rebalance” what the administration describes as an out-of-date federal tax code and to funnel that money into its new spending priorities.

The $1.9 trillion economic stimulus bill, which was passed largely along party lines, put $1,400 in the pockets of Americans as well as extending unemployment benefits and emergency paid leave, among other key elements of the bill — all of it done to help speed the nation’s recovery. It also included health insurance benefits.

But as we hit the one-year anniversary of pandemic-related lockdowns, the lack of clarity in applying business interruption insurance persists as insurance carriers and courts apply policy considerations in strikingly differing manners. This is resulting in wildly varying outcomes for insureds.

Professor Ludovic “Ludo” Phalippou has criticized private equity as “a billionaire factory” and has testified about its lackluster performance for Pennsylvania pension funds. The field includes Wall Street investment managers who buy private companies to resell them at profit while charging pension funds and other big investors high fees.

The original will might be “safe” in a safe deposit box, but it would be inaccessible without a probate judge’s order — and what does a judge need to make that order?

The American Rescue Plan includes a temporary increase in tax credits for many people who buy health insurance through the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces. Those credits will reduce the premiums that eligible Americans pay for coverage. But who is eligible?

Temperatures are rising with the arrival of spring, meaning consumers will be growing more active, and the Treasury Department reported this week that it had made 127 million payments totaling $325 billion in the first two weeks after President Joe Biden had signed the latest economic support package totaling $1.9 trillion.

Buttigieg appeared before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in an opening gambit to sell Congress on President Joe Biden’ s infrastructure plan. Congress just passed a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill, but Buttigieg told lawmakers that a broader economic recovery will require a national commitment.

The realization that most Americans aren’t ready for retirement has caused many states across our country to take initiative to help increase retirement plan access and savings by implementing state-run programs.

Shane Westhoelter was in his early 20s, selling life insurance policies with $5,000 and $10,000 death amounts door to door in a small town when he found his “why.”

—Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell told Congress on Tuesday that more must be done to limit the economic damage from the coronavirus pandemic. Both officials struck upbeat notes about the U.S. economy’s outlook in their appearances Tuesday.

Ohio National executives today announced an expansive reorganization plan to demutualize the company. The deal includes the conversion of Ohio National Mutual Holdings to a stock company and the issuance of all of its newly issued stock to Constellation Insurance Holdings.

The economy is “much improved” since the CARES Act was enacted a year ago but the recovery is still “far from complete,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said in remarks published Monday. But even though “the worst” was avoided and the recovery now “looks to be strengthening,” the country is still facing major economic challenges.

President Joe Biden’s Cabinet is nearly complete with the confirmation of Labor Secretary Marty Walsh on Monday. But the work of building his administration is just beginning, as Biden has hundreds of key presidential appointments to make.

Eligible individuals, and their dependent children, are receiving federal checks for $1,400 each, with deposits beginning to show up this week in the bank accounts of Ohioans. In his first visit to Ohio as president, Joe Biden will speak in Columbus on Tuesday as part of his national tour touting his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act.

However, the report does not look at premiums for 2020 and 2021, in which average benchmark plans on the exchange started creeping downward, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reported.

In the complaint, lawyers for the Eagles said that “despite best efforts to navigate the pandemic,” the team and its insured subsidiaries “have incurred and continue to incur substantial financial loss” caused by the pandemic and the disruption it caused to businesses everywhere.

This decision to postpone retirement is driven primarily by financial reasons, MetLife said, with respondents citing the top reasons for the delay as a continued need for a monthly income (31%) and that the pandemic has impacted their ability to save (23%).

If Chubb absorbs Hartford in the $23 billion deal, it will mark the final stage for a company known to many over the decades as The Hartford, a favorite across the life insurance and property/casualty markets.

Up to 16 million people in the United States may have had undiagnosed, asymptomatic COVID-19 as of September 2020– twice as many as previously estimated– an analysis of life insurance applicants published Tuesday by JAMA Network Open reported. J

—The Federal Reserve foresees the economy accelerating quickly this year yet still expects to keep its benchmark interest rate pinned near zero through 2023, despite concerns in financial markets about potentially higher inflation. The Fed also said it would continue its monthly purchases of $120 billion in bonds.

President Joe Biden signed the sweeping $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package last week, and $1,400 checks are already arriving in individual bank accounts. When the checks are getting the most attention, several items in the bill will help small-employer agencies and advisor businesses, trade association executives say.