Clients with life insurance and annuities may be watching the bear market rummaging around on the mutual funds' picnic table, and wondering what it means for them.
The answer is: It depends.
Campers know that bears hardly ever go into the tents of responsible campers. But what if campers accidentally left some toothpaste in their backpacks?
And just how crazy is that bear?
Life insurers, advisors and clients now have to wait to see just how good life insurers were at bear market proofing.
The Bear Market
The stock market enters a bear market what stock prices drop 20% or more from recent highs.
Because of efforts by the Federal Reserve Board to wean the economy off cheap borrowed money, and concerns about turmoil in Europe, droughts, COVID-19, supply chain disruption and other factors, stock prices have become much less predictable than they have been for most of the past two years.
The S&P 500 stock index closed Thursday at 3,666.77, down 24% from a Jan. 3 high of 4,796.56.
The Chicago Board of Options Exchange VIX index, a "fear gauge" that reflects the volatility of the S&P 500 Index, closed at 32.95.
That's not nearly as high as it was in early March 2020, when investors began to understand the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the VIX closed at over 65. But the VIX is noticeably higher than it was from around April 2021 through January, when it usually bounced between about 15 and 21.
What It Means
Here are five ideas about what the bear market means for life and annuity issuers.
1. Clients could swarm on life and annuity products with benefits guarantees like ants on a candy bar that fell under the picnic table.
Sales of products such as non-variable indexed annuities and non-variable indexed universal life insurance policies soar, as clients flocks to arrangements that can protect them against further drops in stock prices but help them share in gains if and when prices go back up.
2. Life insurers may be happy to sell those clients products with some types of guarantees.
Because of a combination of risk management strategies and regulatory constraints, life insurers like using high-grade corporate bonds to support life and annuity product guarantees.
At the start of the month, overall yields on bonds were already about 2 percentage points higher than they had been recently. This week, the Federal Reserve Board pushed a key interest rate it controls, the federal funds rate, up 0.75 percentage points, to a range of 1.5% to 1.75%. That could help increase life insurers' bond earnings even more.
3. Liquidity concerns could make life insurers look beautiful.
Market observers have complained that one challenge the investment markets are facing is a decrease in liquidity, or the ability to close stock sales.
