Appeal No. 2005-2642
Reexamination Control No. 90/005,841
Action at 15-16, ¶¶ 25-27. The rejections of claims 24 and 36 based on
Mukherjee in view of Musmanno have been affirmed for the reasons given above.
Claim 31 specifies that the principal component of the deposit account is “retired
over a plurality of iteration periods in the account term by payments to the depositor in
each iteration period.”16 Because the payout is recited as being retired “over a plurality
of iteration periods,” the examiner is correct to conclude that this claim recites the
payout characteristic of an annuity. Final Action at 15, ¶ 25. Appellant does not
contend otherwise. For this payout feature, the examiner relies on Bodie, which is
concerned with how to generate retirement income that is protected against inflation.
Bodie, following a brief discussion (at 5, para. bridging cols. 1-2) of the unsatisfactory
performance of equity-based variable annuities (VA’s) based on common stocks,
explains that what is needed is a “purchasing power annuity (PPA).” After noting that
PPA’s in the form of inflation-indexed government bonds are available, Bodie’s
summarizes his own, alternate proposal for a PPA:
At first glance, the only asset that appears capable of providing a
base for such an annuity would be default-free bonds linked to some index
of the cost of living. Although proposals for the U.S. government or some
other institution to issue such price-indexed bonds have abounded, there
is no indication that anyone with the power and authority to implement any
of these proposals in inclined to do so.
Given the apparent reluctance, it not outright opposition, on the part
of government and private corporations to the issuance of price-indexed
bonds, the relevant question is whether we can find any other asset, or
combination of assets, currently existing in [begin page 6, first column] the
U.S. financial system that could fulfill the same function. The empirical
16 This claim does not specify how the deposit accrual component is paid out.
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