All articles by Maria Teresa Cometto – Page 14
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Features
Modified cash balance
B y mid-March 2003 a huge battle can burst out in the American workplace, involving up to 42m employees, who are still enrolled in traditional defined benefit (DB) pension plans. At stake is the conversion of these plans into the so-called ‘cash balance’ retirement schemes, which was halted in September ...
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Features
Nightmare on ALM street
American defined benefit (DB) pension funds may become the next nightmare for US corporations. David Blitzer, chairman of Standard & Poor’s index committee, predicts that pension contributions will replace stock options as the big corporate accounting issue next year. The almost three year severe stock market downturn has deeply damaged ...
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Features
Rumour of death exaggerated
Last July the US stock funds suffered a $52.4bn withdrawal, the second biggest cash-out as a percentage of assets and the largest ever in dollar volume. A healthy portion of mutual fund assets comes from contributions to individual retirement schemes like 401(k) plans and IRAs (Individual retirement accounts). To many ...
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Features
Partnering with clients
The Army Emergency Relief and the Clara Abbot Foundation are two of the American endowments that recently have chosen Northern Trust to outsource their entire investment programme. The first body – committed to assist soldiers and their families to overcome financial emergencies – outsourced a $230m (E237m) portfolio; the second ...
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Features
Market shaken by Merrill Lynch investigation
Merrill Lynch may be $100m poorer having reached an agreement with New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer but, in doing the deal, it has avoided the prospect of a forced separation of research and investment banking. Nevertheless, the scandal has run long enough to have a huge impact on the ...
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Features
Wary about transparency
More transparency is bad for pension funds? Apparently yes, according to the last survey made by Greenwich Associates among portfolio managers at more than 300 of the largest US-based institutions. The majority of them (53%) think that the financial market has changed for the worse with the introduction of Reg ...
