Analysis and opinion – Page 9
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FeaturesCorporate reporting: Where were the parents?
Financial reports are normally dull affairs. Apart from the endless reams of paper detailing figures that few people understand, most of us just want to know a few key facts: whether the bottom line profit number is higher or lower than last year; whether the overall balance sheet can be summed up with a correspondingly big number – big is always better; and, critically, whether there will be a dividend.
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Opinion Pieces
Bold thinking needed
Muted and constrained economic growth, continued low yields and quantitative easing, combined with a poor investment return outlook, loom over Europe’s pension sector.
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Opinion Pieces
Bond bubble threatens emerging markets
Although the prospect of a trade war is the tail risk that has most worried fund managers since mid-2018, other potential perils look more threatening
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Opinion Pieces
Systemic risk debate intensifies
The financial system is facing its greatest challenge since the 2018 financial crisis
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Opinion Pieces
What's in a pensions minister?
Last month, Jerry Moriarty, the chief executive of the Irish Association of Pension Funds, called on the country’s government to appoint a pensions minister
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Features
Perspective: Fear the walking dead
Zombie firms – those dependent on the easy availability of cheap credit – threaten to suck the life out of otherwise viable companies
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Opinion Pieces
Pensions in a hostile climate
Outside the realm of US public pension plans, where generous return assumptions and inflated discount rates are common, the medium and long-term outlook for asset classes is of serious importance to most pension funds.
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Opinion Pieces
Storing up future pain
Anyone who back in 2008 had accurately predicted what monetary policy would look like today would certainly have been regarded as unhinged.
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Opinion Pieces
Do not let costs become an obsession
Our report this month on management and outsourcing discusses how pension funds must increasingly rely on external organisations to analyse their portfolios, particularly from a cost perspective.
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Opinion Pieces
Time to talk pensions
At a press briefing last month, Bill Galvin, chief executive of the UK’s £68bn (€77bn) Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), emphasised the importance of improving its communication policy.
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Opinion Pieces
A Franco-German challenge
France and Germany are the two countries that stand out the most for their comprehensive state pension systems and for underdeveloped second-pillar framework
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Opinion Pieces
Market paradoxes demand new ideas
It is the most fundamental premise of investing yet it is increasingly redundant: invest your money rather than hiding it under the mattress
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Opinion Pieces
China’s human rights abuses pose challenges
Investors who are serious about ESG should ask themselves about their China strategies
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Opinion Pieces
An ageing Europe needs radical policy ideas
The Centre for Social Justice – a UK centre-right think tank – has proposed retirement policy reforms including raising the country’s state pension age to 75 by 2035
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Features
Pension promises: Hybrid plan accounting
Staff at the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) are sketching out an approach to tackle so-called hybrid pension plan accounting
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Features
Global conflict: Another side of the triangle
So much attention is focused on the trade conflict between the US and China that it is all too easy to miss the bigger picture
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Features
Passive investment: Dawn of a new banner theme
This follow-up article on the rise of index investing highlights how pension plans are seeking to promote stewardship among their index managers
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Features
Relative response to liquidity issues
Equity risk is a crucial portfolio exposure for pension funds and a key driver for long-term retirement outcomes for pension plans and their beneficiaries. Yet the structure of equity markets is in transition, which changes the way pension funds choose to allocate capital to them.
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Features
The Disneyworld trap
The remarkable reversal in the outlook for official interest rates over the past few months has received relatively little attention. Until recently it was widely accepted that rates could only move upwards. It looked almost certain that quantitative tightening (QT) would supplant quantitative easing (QE). Now the balance has reverted to further monetary accommodation.
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Features
Italy’s first-pillar obsession
Italy’s anti-establishment, eurosceptic coalition government has partly delivered on its promise to reform the pension system. ‘Dismantling’ the 2011 pension reform that curtailed benefits and raised the retirement age was key for both coalition partners – the Five Star Movement and the Lega. Previous governments had raised the retirement age.
