More comment – Page 48
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Features
Up the knowledge curve
Public understanding of long-term investment can be limited. Repeated exercises in the Netherlands have shown that when pension fund members are asked about their investment-risk tolerance, they say they want a higher return and no risk
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Features
Economics trumps demographics
The challenges facing Swiss pension funds owe more to economics and less to demography than is generally realised.
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Features
Pensions should have a wider purpose
Pension funds like to emphasise that their key goal is to provide sustainable retirement income to their members.Yet many pension funds spend significant resources on addressing issues that go beyond providing pensions
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Book Review
Book Review: An energy supply for life
Joseph Mariathasan reviews Wade Allison’s Nuclear is for Life: A Cultural Revolution
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Book Review
Book Review: The Future of Pension Management
Where others might lose themselves in a discussion on organisational design, regulation or social policy, Keith Ambachtsheer’s book wastes no time in placing pension funds at the heart of capitalism
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Opinion Pieces
Long-Term Matters: Hug a whistle-blower
Ask any board director or chief executive of a well-run company what they worry about most and the answer is invariably ‘what I don’t know is happening’
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Opinion Pieces
Guest Viewpoint: Peter Kraneveld – International Pensions Adviser
“Let’s stop using the term de-risking altogether and use the right words for what we are doing”
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Opinion Pieces
Letter from Brussels: Ethical pressures mount
There are plenty of indicators of rising pressure to advance ethical standards across the financial sector. One outcome takes the form of mountains of clean-up legislation, including from Brussels.
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Opinion Pieces
Letter from the US: The robo-race starts
Robo-advisers are gaining ground in the US retirement industry. Their success will have an impact on the market, accelerating the shift of assets out of actively managed funds and into index funds
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Book ReviewBook review: Ambachtsheer's 'The Future of Pension Management'
IPE editor Liam Kennedy reviews Keith Ambachtsheer’s latest book on the pensions industry
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Features
Breaking Germany’s mould
Federal civil servants at two government ministries are searching for a workable policy to promote occupational pensions
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Opinion Pieces
Letter from Brussels: Beefing up the CMU
Inadequacy of European national court systems in the financial sphere is due for overhaul. Upgrade is necessary if the EU’s capital markets union programme (CMU) is going to get anywhere, according to a high-status paper
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Features
Negative rates are truly negative
It is instructive to remember that only a few years ago it was common for negative interest rates to be dismissed as impossible.
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Opinion Pieces
Letter from the US: The Yale effect
Good things come in small packages. It sounds so true reading the latest annual National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) Commonfund study of endowment performance.
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Features
Appeasing the gatekeeper
Last year I attended a drinks reception organised by a UK consultancy. The event was arranged specifically to allow the firm’s staff to meet with the asset management community. The theme running through the opening remarks was simple: “We have no current or future plans to offer fiduciary management, therefore we will never compete with you.”
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Opinion Pieces
Long-Term Matters: A climate culture clash
The Netherlands and the US are both free-market countries with thriving financial industries. But they also are very different and this is an unrecognised risk for large US mutual fund managers.
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Opinion Pieces
Guest Viewpoint: Heribert Karch, MetallRente
A few months ago, if someone had asked me to tell them about Deutschland-Rente (Germany-pension), I would have attempted to explain our state pension system to them
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Features
ABP open season
Would you set up an ABP now if you were creating a public sector pension regime from scratch for the Netherlands? The simplicity of a single scheme and the economies of scale in investment and administration all call for it. But other factors speak against
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Features
Stop monkeying around
Twenty years ago it made sense to use Chinese new year as a peg to discuss investing in China. A decade ago it had worn thin. To do it this year was a sign of hopeless naivety.
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Features
High-yield bonds: Expect dispersion
Last year was a difficult one for high-yield bond investors, particularly in the US, driven by a collapse in metals and mining on top of the decline in oil prices
