Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 56
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Opinion PiecesLetter from US: US pension funds decide on Russian holdings
“We support efforts at all levels of government and across the public and private sectors, which include cross-functional and multi-agency partnerships, to divest State Treasury and pension funds from investments in Russian-domiciled companies. We are committed to taking steps that include divesting as soon as possible to have the quickest and most meaningful impact on this tragic situation.”
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InterviewsUkraine & Russia: War-proofing portfolios
Investors react to outbreak of hostilities and reflect on asset allocation in the months ahead
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FeaturesStrategically speaking interview: Redwheel’s new CEO
Last August, RWC Partner’s chief executive Dan Mannix left the company, and the head of business development, Tord Stallvik took over. Soon afterwards, the company rebranded as Redwheel – RWC was an acronym for Red Wheel Capital.
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Opinion PiecesUK's pension dashboard project should prioritise accuracy over simplification
The UK’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) consultation on the draft Pensions Dashboards Regulations 2022 closed last month. The DWP now aims to lay the regulations before parliament for debate later in the year.
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InterviewsFast and slow: Finland’s Veritas makes new additions to the portfolio construction toolbox
Kari Vatanen, chief investment officer of Finnish pensions insurer Veritas, tells Pirkko Juntunen about his views on diversification in a world where fundamentals are no longer the driver
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FeaturesLonger lives lead to numerous societal challenges
“Demographics is the single most important factor that nobody pays attention to, and when they do pay attention, they miss the point,” management and pensions guru Peter Drucker once declared. The key issue is not only that people are living much longer, but that fertility rates are below the population replacement rate of 2.1 children per female everywhere in the world apart from Africa.
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FeaturesAccounting: IASB grapples with IAS 19
The staff could hardly have been more blunt: “Overall, we received mixed feedback on our IAS 19 [International Accounting Standard 19] proposal,” they told the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) in March. The proposal in question is a March 2021 exposure draft in which the IASB trialled a new approach to disclosure by focusing on objectives aimed at teasing out relevant information.
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FeaturesHealthcare investing: Get ready for the next pandemic
The world will have to collaborate on many fronts to ensure preparedness for the next global health crisis.
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Opinion PiecesGuest viewpoint: The fault with the default setting for COVID mortality in standard tables
The Continuous Mortality Investigation (CMI) is a subsidiary company of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) in the UK. The CMI has a long history of providing high-quality and impartial analysis on mortality and morbidity. It is mainly focused on gathering data to produce standard mortality tables across various sub-populations of interest to actuaries, including term assurances, annuitants and pension schemes.
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FeaturesUkraine & Russia: Asset allocation and investing in a time of war
It is a well-known fact that geopolitical events have no lasting impact on financial markets. However, Russian president Vladimir Putin’s decision to wage war on Ukraine has forced institutional investors to reassess their strategies. While stock market indices tend to recover fairly soon after the initial shock of a geopolitical event, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine has potentially wide-ranging consequences beyond a sudden spike in volatility.
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Features
The case for an EU consolidated tape
Liquidity. Equality. Fragility. With apologies to the French Republic, these three words almost act as a lodestone in discussions about a consolidated tape (CT) for EU securities. The need for such a tape is becoming more apparent than ever, but it could still be three years or so before it become a reality, according to Susan Yavari, regulatory policy adviser at the European Fund and Asset Management Association (EFAMA) and the author of a detailed official position paper on the subject published in mid-February.
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FeaturesFixed income, rates & currencies: War and inflation dominate
While we watch horrible scenes of towns and cities under bombardment, their bewildered and bloodied citizens desperately searching for safety, the huge shockwaves generated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine are spreading rapidly far beyond both countries’ borders.
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FeaturesAhead of the curve: The future looks bright for African private equity
The Russian-Ukrainian war and its related global impact may have a mixed effect on economic recovery in Africa, which is being driven by worldwide economic trends such as elevated commodity prices, a relaxation of lockdowns, and increased global trade. With further increases in commodity prices having a positive impact, increased inflation and further possible roll-backs in globalisation weigh on the recovery.
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FeaturesDefining the precise scale advantages for DB pension funds
Most people working in the institutional asset management space have an intuitive understanding that the size of the institution, measured by total assets under management (AUM), has an impact on performance – that bigger funds tend to perform slightly better. On the other hand, there are plenty of stories of successful hedge funds that got too large and lost their way, unable to continue delivering on past success due to their size. So which is it? Do larger institutional investors outperform their smaller kin, or is AUM the proverbial millstone in terms of performance?
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Features
Qontigo Riskwatch: April 2022
* Data as of 28 February 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 commentary April 2022
With a threat of nuclear war looming, Russia increasingly looking exhausted and desperate but unwilling to make concessions and a Russian default threatening, the world is again as dangerous as it was during the cold war. A default now cannot be compared with Russia’s de facto default in 1998.
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Special ReportSpecial Report - Regulation
Europe’s flagship SFDR regime for ESG was never intended to become a fund-labelling framework. So as Susanna Rust also writes in this issue, it is a relief that the EU is now consulting on minimum requirements for Article 8 funds. In this Special Report, we look in some depth at how asset managers have embraced SFDR, taking in the broad reclassification exercise that has taken place to relabel existing funds, and the short-term risks of greenwashing. In the longer term, the hope is for much more standardisation and there are signs that this is already happening.
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Country ReportCountry Report – Pensions in The Netherlands (March 2022)
The nominal treatment of liabilities in the Netherlands’ FTK pension regulatory framework means schemes don’t need to explicitly hedge inflation. But Dutch inflation came in at one of the highest rates in the euro-zone in January, and there has been strong criticism in the last decade about pension indexation cuts.
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Country ReportDutch pension funds tackle inflation
With a nominal liabilities framework under the current FTK rules and a new system around the corner, Dutch schemes are not rushing to inflation-proof their portfolios
