All articles by Maria Teresa Cometto – Page 12
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Features
Marè’s advice: hold your course
Italy is on the brink of dramatic changes to its pension fund market. Either the Maroni reform goes on and pension funds grow strongly, or the industry will face a new paralysis that will be detrimental to future retirees. A third way, which is going back to a very generous ...
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Features
Pensions disarray on Capitol Hill
It is spring, but it already feels like November when US Congressional elections will take place. The political fall wind is already freezing any attempt to approve unpopular or controversial legislation. That explains why the US Congress left for its two-week Easter recess without approving a new pension legislation, which ...
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Features
Positive currents in DC market
More retirement savings, easier investment choices, lower management fees. A worker’s dream? No it is not, according to recent research about new trends in US defined contribution (DC) plans. Thanks to regulatory and market pressures, in 2006 DC plans, like 401(k)s, will conquer more participants and will be more understandable. ...
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Features
The next big thing?
They could be the ‘new big thing’ in the US savings industry. And like the individual retirement accounts, the new Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) imply putting aside tax free money and investing it in stocks and bonds. Although the sums are smaller, the potential is not: there could be $75bn ...
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Features
Fee rises strain mutual loyalties
Is TIAA-CREF losing its soul? Certainly it’s losing some business and critics have started questioning the results of the ‘Merrillisation’ of this $360bn (e303bn) management company founded 87 years ago by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie as a non profit organisation to provide low-cost retirement plans and insurance for teachers and researchers ...
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Features
More questions than answers
How deep will the changes to the pension accounting rules go? How will they affect companies’ financial strategies? Will they trigger the termination of defined benefit (DB) plans in the private sector? These are just a few of the questions haunting the US pension funds’ industry after the Financial Accounting ...
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Features
A gamble in long term or safe bet?
Long-term bond yields are a conundrum for US pension funds. They are the culprit for many of the funds’ troubles – having increased the burden of their liabilities and decreased the cash earned on fixed income assets – and they pose a big puzzle: should DB (defined benefit) plans buy ...
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Features
PBGC reaches defining moment
More urgent than fixing social security, is preventing the bankruptcy of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp (PBGC). The US Congress thinks so and is willing to discuss new legislation - the pension protection act (PPA) - to avoid a public bailout of private pension funds that could dwarf the $200bn ...
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Features
Funds: bouncing back
Alarm bells about the impending pension crisis seem to have faded away. US corporate and public pension funds have achieved good returns in 2004. If assets returns continue to perform in line with historical norms, and interest rates return to more normal levels, the funding pressures should ease, according to ...
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Features
Testing times for private accounts
If people are free to choose, they will choose freedom. This political philosophy, which was strongly embraced by Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s, is now at the core of the Bush administration in every field, including economy. It is the very same principle that would justify a pension reform ...
