SOA: macro links to mortality
Kara Clark of the Society of Actuaries said a new oversight group will bridge population‑level economic signals and insured mortality, stressing the need to translate macro shocks into actuarial risk models. — the initiative highlights how macroeconomic indicators are being operationalized for longevity and insurance risk analysis. (youtube.com)
Kara Clark is listed as Senior Practice Research Actuary at the Society of Actuaries Research Institute and appears as host/participant on SOA Research Insights and Longevity Brief podcast episodes discussing long‑term mortality drivers. (soa.org) The SOA’s Quarterly Mortality Monitoring Report (QMMR) is produced by a named “Quarterly Mortality Monitoring Oversight Group” and the January 2026 update reports data through September 2025. (soa.org) The QMMR shows an age‑standardized death rate of 835.3 per 100,000 for the 12‑month period October 2024–September 2025 and reports this as a 0.9% decline versus the July 2024–June 2025 rolling period. (soa.org) SOA QMMR figures call out by‑age changes: the 20–49 cohort registered the largest improvement with a 5.6% drop in Q3‑2025 versus Q3‑2024. (soa.org) The QMMR credits its Oversight Group membership to Sam Gutterman, Ed Hui, Tom Kukla, and Larry Stern, who are named in the report acknowledgments. (soa.org) Separate SOA/MLOAC workstreams have produced an Individual Life Mortality Improvement recommendation for AG‑38/VM‑20 purposes (Sept. 2025) and a Life Mortality Improvement Subgroup has discussed switching inputs from general population data to insured‑population data to address puzzling mortality degradation at ages 80+. (soa.org, naic.org) The QMMR release also includes an updated Excel/VBA workbook containing data from 2000–September 2025 disaggregated by sex, single age, and 14 cause‑of‑death categories, plus interactive parameterized graphs for trend visualization. (soa.org)
