All Features articles – Page 100
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Features
Pensions Accounting: IAS19 in 2013
The priorities facing defined-benefit plan sponsors who report under IAS19 during 2013 split neatly between short-term volatility concerns and the longer-term challenge of implementing IASB’s recent revisions to the standard, say two leading consultants who spoke to IPE about their priorities for 2013.
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FeaturesLiving longer, working longer?
Chris Madsen and Martijn Tans explain their concept of equilibrium retirement age as a tool to help individuals and employers manage longevity risk and plan for retirement
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Features
The inflation trade-off
Hedging against unexpected inflation can be costly. But Karsten Jeske and Anjun Zhou argue that active management can shift the efficient frontier in investors’ favour While inflation and inflation volatility were relatively subdued until the late 1990s, inflation volatility has picked up again in the 2000s. Evidence shows us that more uncertainty about inflation lies ahead.
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Features
ETFs: Part of the furniture
Amin Rajan argues that the success story of exchange traded funds is here to stay
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Features
Is there light at the end of the tunnel?
For months now, a large and rather vocal contingent of the European pensions industry has been debating the additional costs they might incur if they are subject to solvency capital requirements similar to Solvency II’s pillar one.
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Features
When west goes east
‘Go West’ was not just a 1990s song by the Pet Shop Boys. For decades, this was the goal of people trying to escape from life behind the Iron Curtain.
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Features
Don’t be surprised by inflation
Nicholas Johnson, Berdibek Ahmedov and Ronit Walny argue that now is the time to build a real asset bucket in diversified portfolios
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Features
Different worlds
Nina Röhrbein spoke with Loit Linnupold, responsible for Swedbank’s Estonian pension fundsInfluenced by its linguistic ties with Finland, its financial links to the Baltic and Nordic regions, its Soviet past, its EU and euro membership, illiquid stock market and virtually no public debt, Estonia is a unique place in which to manage a pension portfolio.
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Features
Diary of an Investor: A tale of two funding ratios
Just before Christmas I met my friend Ronald, who is CEO of the pension fund for forklift truck drivers. We meet for a beer one evening after work in our regular haunt in Utrecht. As usual, Ronald is not a happy man, and as usual, it comes down to numbers.
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Features
Crunch time for UK occupational pensions
Unveiling in his proposals to reinvigorate workplace pensions – a long-standing pledge of the UK’s coalition government that critics noted, until that point, had yet to be addressed – pensions minister Steve Webb argued that continued inaction in the area of occupational schemes was simply not an option.
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Features
Focus Group: Communicating risk to trustees
Over 90% of participants in this month’s Off The Record survey said their fund had an investment committee, while 38% also had a risk committee. Around 28% additionally had other committee structures, such as for pensions, audit, and administration.
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Features
Mark-to-market blues
Lucy Prebble’s musical Enron, about the troubled energy company of the same name, famously features a song routine on mark-to-market accounting. Marking pension liabilities to market is a complex issue, fraught not only with market and technical considerations but now, increasingly, with political ones.
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Features
Better the virtuous circle
In theory, insurers, pension funds, endowments and other long-term investors will match their liability stream with long-term investments in the productive economy. So, over several economic cycles, their investments fund their liabilities, but their investments in government debt also help pay for the roads and schools that benefit current and future members and pensioners. Their equity and corporate-bond investments finance company growth and foster employment. Property and infrastructure investments help them attain real, inflation-linked cashflows, while also financing long-term economic expansion.
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Features
Australia: gateway to Asia?
It is right on Asia’s doorstep, but James Dunn finds that outside the big resource names there is surprisingly little Asia exposure in Australia’s stock market
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Features
Don’t be afraid to ask questions
Gail Moss finds out the kind of information pension fund trustees should seek from their asset managers since they cannot realistically be expected to understand the many complex products and strategies that are used to manage risk
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Features
Pensions Accounting: Can they fix it?
Stephen Bouvier sets out the problems facing the IFRIC interpretation committee on the treatment of single-A corporate bonds in discounting pension liabilities
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Features
Rise of CTAs and global macro
Of the 59% 0f respondents to this month’s survey that do invest in hedge funds, 10 invest via funds of funds and 10 invest direct – confirming a trend to combine the two approaches to the market. One UK fund confirmed that it was moving from funds of funds to ...
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Features
Storm-ready
Devastating natural phenomena are measured with two types of intensity scale. Hurricanes have the Saffir-Simpson scale for wind speed, for example, but also the Fujita scale that measures property damage.
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Features
Worriless provision
Samuel Lisse tells Nina Röhrbein about Vita Sammelstiftung’s semi-autonomous model
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Features
No panacea
The coming weeks are scheduled to see the publication of the European Commission’s Green Paper on long-term investing, announced by the single market commissioner Michel Barnier earlier this year.
