More comment – Page 40
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Opinion Pieces
Letter from the US: A model for future cuts?
The pension industry is concerned with the consequences of a bipartisan amendment to the $1.1trn (€924 bn) ominbus spending bill that Congress approved in December. This cuts benefits for multi-employer plan members and experts are now debating whether it is a model for further cuts across the industry.
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Opinion Pieces
Guest viewpoint: Bernhard Wiesner - Bosch Group
Does the new IORP II Directive reflect the needs of sponsoring companies and their IORPs in Europe?
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Features
Frozen conflict
Since a 1964 report on road pricing in the UK, authored by one RJ Smeed, the idea of charging citizens for use of public highways has been repeatedly raised in Britain.
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Opinion Pieces
Letter from the US: Data managers
Technological tools, data management, attention to governance and transparency are the most important issues for pension fund CIOs right now.
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Features
Investors are ‘ill prepared’ for climate change
Investors are ill prepared for a loss of asset value due to climate change, according to a poll conducted at the 2014 IPE Conference.At the event, 83% of delegates said they were badly or very badly prepared for such a development.
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Features
Savvy execution is the new silver bullet
In the third article in a new series, Pascal Blanqué and Amin Rajan argue that the ex post returns no longer match the ex ante promises
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Opinion Pieces
Guest viewpoint: Con Keating - BrightonRock Group
With 78% of pension funds considering themselves long-term investors in an IPE Focus Group survey, it would be tempting to believe that dramatic progress had been made towards achieving the objectives of the Kay Review on UK equity markets.
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Opinion Pieces
Guest Viewpoint: “Asset owners and managers need to address the problems in the investment industry and focus on value for the ultimate beneficiaries”
We need to move on from today’s investment world, which essentially has been built by intermediaries for intermediaries. Their purposes have become too narrow and too self-centred to be of sustainable value to asset owners, who are charged with transporting and growing savings across time – affordably, securely and fairly.
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Opinion Pieces
Research: Ageing demographics are an asset allocation game changer
Two of the four worst bear markets of the last century rocked the world of investing over just seven years in the last decade. They sidelined conventional wisdom on risk premia and diversification.
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Opinion Pieces
Letter from the US: End to pensions taboo
Pension reform is no longer a taboo subject for voters: this is one of the outcomes of the 4 November mid-term elections.
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Book Review
Book Review: Exploding the fairy tale
Essays in Positive Investment Management, Pascal Blanqué,
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Features
A-shares on the rise
There are signs that European institutional investors find Chinese equities interesting. Finland’s Ilmarinen now separates China equity holdings (A and H-shares), in its reports, and Denmark’s AP Pension has boosted its China equity exposure to 5%, although it has excluded domestic property and banks.
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Features
That’s about the size of it
In late September, one of the world’s largest pension funds ditched its hedge funds, and one of the world’s largest mutual funds lost its manager. One decision made sense, but not for the reasons most commentators put forward. The other made sense, despite all the focus on the nonsense surrounding it.
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Features
Hill’s grilling on an open fire
After two hearings and nearly six hours of grandstanding and deflection, rhetorical and leading questions, the European Parliament in October approved Jonathan Hill’s appointment as financial services commissioner.
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Opinion Pieces
Letter from Brussels: Capital market union
The capital market union (CMU) is a new emphasis in Brussels and Jonathan Hill, the new Commissioner for financial services, mentioned the subject repeatedly at his initial vetting by MEPs.
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Opinion Pieces
Letter from the US: Pensions and start-ups
Can pension funds play a greater role in stimulating start-ups and economic growth? Some US politicians think so and are trying to deploy public retirement assets for this goal. But critics claim that results have been disappointing so far, mostly because pension funds invest through private equity funds that demand very high fees. So a new idea is gaining support – pension funds investing directly in private companies, cutting out intermediaries.
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Opinion Pieces
Guest viewpoint: “Macro matters. We ignore it at our peril”
Open a newspaper. Any newspaper. Read the front page and then the business pages. Absorb, assimilate, repeat. After half a dozen goes, you may notice a pattern.
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Features
The ‘what’ and ‘why’ of costs
Controversies around pension funds’ asset management costs in various countries tell us something about the mood of the times, but they also suggest that changes are needed in the way pension boards select and justify their strategy choices to members and the wider world.
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Features
Divergence trades, depression trades
“It’s one of our big themes,” said Kathleen Hughes, head of European institutional sales at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, talking about central bank policy divergence over meet-the-press drinks in early September, four hours after European Central Bank president Mario Draghi had taken the deposit rate further into negative territory and announced plans to purchase covered bonds and asset-backed securities. The euro had a terrible day; Goldman Sachs had a pretty good one.
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Features
No rush for auto enrolment
As part of their commitment to turn around their economies, Spain and Portugal have tackled pension issues, both by reducing expenditure and by taking the first steps towards making retirement systems fairer and more efficient.
