Asset Allocation – Page 166
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Features
RIsing the EM roller coaster
It is a fallacy that the world is divided into countries that have already emerged and those that are emerging, said Roger Nightingale, economic adviser to pension funds and global strategist at Millennium Global Investments, kicking off the recent IP E-Symposium on ‘Emerging markets investing’. “The vast majority of non-emerged ...
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Features
Caution is king
BVV is Germany’s largest Pensionskasse with total assets of €16.9bn at the end of 2004, according to data from the German regulator BaFin. Total assets were nearly three times their level in 1990 and also make BVV nearly three times the size of its nearest rival; BVV’s membership stood at ...
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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
Mandatory call in Germany
The German Union Federation (DGB) has urged the government to make it compulsory for employers to offer corporate pensions to their employees. Speaking in Berlin, DGB vice chairman Ursula Engelen-Kefer said the move was necessary to, in the first place, compensate for future reductions in the state pension. As a ...
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Features
Building confidence in indexation
In the Netherlands indexation of pension benefits to either wage or price increases has long been considered a guaranteed right. Although indexation used to be conditional on the pension fund’s position, in practice full indexation was virtually always given. In the communication to pension beneficiaries the possibility of indexation cuts ...
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Features
Bill of rights for the mobile
The European Commission’s proposal for a directive on improving the portability of supplementary pension rights, if accepted, could significantly improve the position of mobile workers – both across borders and within member states – but about which many concerns have been expressed regarding excessive costs. Vladimir Spidla, the European commissioner ...
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Features
When the balance sheet rules
IPE asked three pension funds – in Portugal, the UK and Denmark – the same question: ‘What do you see as the implications of the implementation of IAS 19?’ Here are their answers: Colin Hartridge-Price, scheme secretary and chief pensions officer at the BT Pensions Scheme & BT Retirement ...
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Features
DB back from the dead
When hedge funds, investment banks and private equity firms get involved it’s a sure sign that there’s some potentially serious money to be made. So what’s the hot new market they’re looking at? You might be surprised to learn that it’s the previously unglamorous field of defined benefit (DB) corporate ...
