Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/309392 
Year of Publication: 
2021
Citation: 
[Journal:] Finance and Society [ISSN:] 2059-5999 [Volume:] 7 [Issue:] 1 [Year:] 2021 [Pages:] 20-39
Publisher: 
University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh
Abstract: 
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.
Subjects: 
Financialisation
insurance
Solvency II
fair value
actuarial valuation
aporia
autoimmunity
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc-nd Logo
Document Type: 
Article

Files in This Item:
File
Size
322.26 kB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.