(Photo: Allison Bell/TA)
Years of bond yield famine have led U.S. life insurers to make major changes in their investment portfolios, according to analysts at S&P Global.
Life insurers have respected regulators' and rating analysts investment-quality guidelines, but many have stretched the guidelines by investing in the lowest-rated, highest-paying assets that meet the guideline criteria, and by increasing their exposure to assets that might be hard to sell quickly in an emergency, the analysts report.
U.S. life insurers' exposure to three major types of slow-to-sell assets — private bonds, mortgages and alternative investments — increased to 38% of the insurers' assets in 2017, from only about 33% in 2011, according to an S&P compilation of data from insurers' financial reports.
"For every dollar of investments made over the past five years, 63 cents went toward less-liquid assets," the analysts write.
A team led by Deep Banerjee talk about the impact of life insurers' hunt for yield in a new commentary posted behind a paywall on the S&P Global fixed-income research website.
Bond Market Basics
An "interest rate" is really the rent a borrower pays to rent money.
In the world of bonds, borrowers seen as risky, such as small, shaky companies, usually pay higher interest rates to rent money. Borrowers seen as safer, such as the governments of rich, stable countries, pay lower rates.
Central bankers in the United States and the rest of the world pushed the interest rates they control close to zero, and, in some cases, to less than zero, in the wake of the Great Recession that struck in 2008.
Low rates help homeowners with variable-rate mortgages, shaky companies that have issued variable-rate bonds, and the stock market.
Central bankers were hoping holding rates low would help nurse the economy through the widespread panic caused by the Great Recession.
Life insurers rely heavily on investments in bonds and other fixed-income obligations to support life insurance policies and other products that might lead to long-lasting streams of benefits payments, or to claims that might arrive far in the future.
When possible, life insurers try to match the expected durations of the fixed-income assets they buy with the durations of their insurance and annuity obligations.
