(Photo: Allison Bell/ALM)
The U.S. life insurance and life reinsurance operating companies that Moody's Investors Service rates produced just $27 billion in statutory net income in 2018, but they sent $30 billion in dividends upstream to their parent companies.
The life companies' total dividend payments exceeded their total statutory net income for the first time since 2011, according to Manoj Jethani and other Moody's analysts.
(Related: Capital Blue Defends Reserves)
The Moody's analysts have published those figures in a new look at U.S. life insurers' and life reinsurers' capital levels.
The analysts based the net income and dividend figures on proprietary data from SNL Financial LC.
The analysts use the term "operating company" to refer to the licensed life insurance companies and life reinsurance companies that actually write the coverage.
In most cases, the big operating companies are the subsidiaries of top-level companies that, technically, are simply "holding companies," not life insurance companies
