Asset Allocation – Page 226
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Features
Three pillar foundation
Life insurers and banks offering mutual funds stand to gain most from any expansion of Greece’s funded occupational pension plans. The Greek life market is dominated by a handful of insurers. In 2001 the top four had 66% of the market, split between Interamerican (now part of the Netherlands-based consortium ...
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Features
TNO sticks to its guns
There are not many pension plans in the Netherlands that represent workers across such an eclectic diversity of private/government entities ranging from the qualitative labelling of fruit and vegetables through to the technicians in vehicle crash-test dummy laboratories. This is because the TNO organisation is founded by law in The ...
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Features
Italian resurgence
Change in Italy is natural. As Dante famously wrote in the Divine Comedy: “The customs and fashions of men change like leaves on the bough, some of which go and others come.” Unless, that is, you’re talking about Italian pension reform. Few Italian governments over the years have strayed near ...
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Features
Strengthening the second pillar
Slovakia is set to overhaul its entire pensions system, introducing a second-pillar privately funded plan alongside changes to its existing first and third pillar systems. The new proposal is a more radical version of the previous government’s attempts at pensions reforms, which in any case fell by the wayside after ...
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Features
Irish launch for Mercer 360
Mercer Investment Consulting has launched a new product allowing smaller Irish pension funds access to international investment managers. The new service, Mercer 360, combines the investment consulting experience of Mercer with the fund management skills of Attica Asset Management. Attica provides manager of manager products in the UK, and is ...
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Features
War against deflation
Although it may not currently be fashionable to admit it: we are fundamentalists. This relates to our investment and research, not ideological, approach. The first step in every investment decision is the analysis of the key long-term drivers of an investment. We then confront our findings with the consensus view. ...
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Features
And the 'Blue Ribbon' answer...
We propose a more pragmatic direction that leverages the best practices adopted by corporate pension funds. If anything, the mistake made by many reformers was to confuse ‘corporatisation’ with sprivatisations. In our forthcoming book ‘Rethinking Pension Reform’ (Cambridge University Press), we propose a ‘permanent’ solution to the problem of maintaining ...
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Features
Avoiding the 'DB killer'
Agreement on the translation of IAS 19 accounting standards for Dutch pension funds looks set to allay fears about how the standards might affect the Netherlands’ predominantly defined benefit (DB) pension plans. According to Jeroen Steenvoorden, director of the OPF, interested parties, including the OPF, have been talking to and ...
