Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 46
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Opinion Pieces
Australia: Role for superannuation in nation-building
A new Labor government has set the scene for change in Australia’s growing superannuation industry to ensure that some of the country’s A$3.3trn (€2,3trn) savings pool is directed toward social housing and the energy transition.
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Opinion Pieces
US: Transparency concerns over SEC private market disclosure rules
Will the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC’s) new climate risk reporting rules bring more transparency to private markets? Or will they have the unintended consequences of increasing the opacity of the markets?
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Features
International Sustainability Accounting Standards Board: An insider view
Technical director Ravi Abeywardana highlights the challenges faced by the newly minted International Sustainability Standards Board and its staff
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Opinion Pieces
Guest viewpoint: Let’s make ESG real, and call out the fakes
Environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing has become pretty much mainstream. At its ideological base is the belief that a capitalist economy and polity that seeks the well-being of its middle class can achieve positive change by mobilising investment flows – in particular, that environmental protection and social justice can come about by correcting where investments are channelled.
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Interviews
NEST Sammelstiftung: A history of sustainable investing
Ulla Enne (pictured), head of responsible investing and investment operations at Switzerland’s NEST Sammelstiftung, talks to Luigi Serenelli about the pension fund’s central focus on sustainability
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Features
LGIM’s Michelle Scrimgeour: ambitions for growth
Michelle Scrimgeour and her executive team set out their strategic growth priorities in November 2020, a little more than a year after she had taken over as CEO of Legal & General Investment Management (LGIM). They agreed to grow the business by focusing on existing strengths: to modernise, diversify and to internationalise.
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Book Review
Books: How liquid are liquid assets?
Amin Rajan speaks to Pascal Blanqué about his latest book
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Special Report
Why investors use sustainable fixed income ETFs
Sustainable fixed income investing is growing at a rapid rate as investors increasingly seek to address climate risks, meet new regulations, and adapt to new investment preferences. The majority of investors who are choosing indexed exposures to build their sustainable portfolios are currently following SRI indices, with 93% of AUM in sustainable fixed income UCITS ETFs tracking such indices.
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Interviews
Interview: Martin Præstegaard, ATP CEO
On the first day of September, Martin Præstegaard – who was installed little more than a month before as CEO of ATP – told journalists in the pension fund’s Copenhagen offices that ATP had made its biggest six-month investment loss ever.
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Interviews
On the record: Emerging market debt
At a time of high volatility in interest rates, currencies and GDP, two seasoned investors in emerging market debt discuss their approaches
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Opinion Pieces
Italy’s far-right government won’t bring about great changes
The largely anticipated outcome of the Italian election was a strong mandate for the centre-right coalition. This would hardly be a new scenario, were it not for the fact that this time the chosen leader is Giorgia Meloni of Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), a right-wing party with historical links with fascism.
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Opinion Pieces
ESG Viewpoint: The genius of SFDR - requiring ordinal disclosure is so much more than a label
When the EU originally announced its High-Level Action Plan for Sustainable Growth in 2018, its intended eco-label received a lot of attention. Many considered the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) a boring, administrative matter. Labels are shiny commonplace symbols hyped by corporate marketing teams around the world to instil a feel-good factor in retail consumers and bolster the defensibility of institutional buyer decision making. Required Ordinal Disclosure (ROD) is a technocratic idea whose genius has remained largely unrecognised to date.
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Features
IASB's management commentary project faces identity crisis
Any regular follower of the International Accounting Standards Board is probably familiar with a particular recurring nightmare. It starts with good intentions but spirals into shifting project goals, missed targets, and unquantifiable hours of wasted time. Perhaps you awoke during July to find yourself observing the board’s July discussion of its management commentary project.
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Features
Pension funds continue their focus on ESG social issues
Before the year is over, European policymakers are expected to announce their decision to shelve plans for a social taxonomy.
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Features
Market overview: German institutional investors manage uncertainty
At mid-year 2022, the volume of Spezialfonds – the German vehicle for professional investors – administered on Universal Investment’s platform was €498bn, a rise of around 5% year on year. On a six-month basis, however, and compared with the end of the booming stock year 2021, asset volumes were down around 3%.
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Features
Fixed income, rates & currency: Central banks act tough
This year’s Jackson Hole Symposium, an annual high-level event sponsored by the Reserve Bank of Kansas, yielded relatively little policy news. But the fighting talk from the US Federal Reserve and others was striking. Fed chair Jerome Powell’s speech was markedly more hawkish than expected, while Isabel Schnabel, board member of the European Central Bank, referred to the need for central banks to act ‘forcefully’ because “both the likelihood and the cost of current high inflation becoming entrenched in expectations are uncomfortably high”.
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Features
Ahead of the curve: Clearing up the ‘scaling’ confusion in carbon intensity
Today, a company’s carbon intensity is typically measured in one of two ways – scaling by revenue, or by EVIC (enterprise value including cash). The choice an investor makes can lead to differences in portfolio characteristics.
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Features
Qontigo Riskwatch - October 2022
*Data as of 31 August 2022. Forecast risk estimate for each index measured by the respective US, World and Emerging Markets Qontigo model variants
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Features
IPE Quest Expectations Indicator: monthly commentary
Political risk has decreased. An attack in the north-east of Ukraine took the Russian army by surprise but did not cause collateral damage in Russia. Russians’ resistance to the war is mounting but far from a critical level. It looks like the EU will survive the winter without major energy disruption and caps on energy prices are falling into place.