All Features articles – Page 104
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Features
Latin lessons in sovereign default
Emerging market debt managers are brave souls. Take Thomas Brund of Sydinvest, one of the managers featured in this month’s strategy review, who deliberately bought the Ivory Coast before it defaulted. “We were happy to take that default to make sure that we were well-positioned for the upside,” he explains.
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Features
Diary of an Investor: Dog days
It is the end of August. Holidays are a distant memory, the leaves are wilting on the trees and the children are going back to school. The euro crisis isn’t getting any worse and markets have even rallied. Welcome to the dog days of summer.
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Features
Tomorrow’s long-term capitalists
The UK equity market, as Prof John Kay rightly points out in his review ‘UK Markets and Long-term Decision Making’, is no longer majority-owned by UK pension funds and insurers, and has not been for a long time.
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Features
Breaking up is hard to do
In July, Dutch transport pension fund Vervoer sued its former fiduciary manager Goldman Sachs Asset Management (GSAM) for a number of breaches of contract, filing a €250m lawsuit in the UK High Court.
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Features
World Bank rates green bonds
Nina Röhrbein looks at instruments that aim to combine solid SRI credentials with precious yield and a high standard of transparency and stability
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Features
Focus Group: Bad to the bone
Almost three-quarters of respondents to this month’s Off The Record survey felt recent events, such as LIBOR-manipulation and mis-selling, point to major problems with the culture of banking.
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FeaturesCrucial assumptions
Norman Dreger and Andrew Arbour outline why companies with pension obligations in multiple countries should consider carefully which mortality tables to use for accounting valuation
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Features
Taking the time to assess the risk
The latest consultation paper for the holistic balance sheet (HBS) within the revised IORP Directive has aroused great interest across Europe. The European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) gave the pensions industry until 1 August to submit its input on the controversial first quantitative impact study (QIS) for the implementation of the HBS.
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Features
From our perspective: Armour-plating won’t do
Many criticisms of the quantitative impact study consultation of the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) on its holistic balance sheet proposal focused on the exercise itself – that it is too complex and opaque, and only large pension funds have the resources to do it.
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Features
Unconventional wisdom
The search for yield is leading investors to hunt down illiquidity premia. Florian de Sigy and Benjamin Keefe make the case for secondary hedge fund interests
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Features
Vision to reality
Who’s ahead in the race for cross-border pension assets? Gail Moss reports on factors behind the choice of domicile
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Features
The sustainability of longevity
As longevity becomes an increasing problem in developed nations, governments have moved to increase retirement ages, with some either considering or legislating for an automatic link to longevity. Despite its popularity among both national parliaments and the European Union, however, the OECD has warned that any such link could be very difficult to implement.
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Features
Looking to IORP III?
The European Commission’s decision to postpone to summer 2013 its white paper on the IORP II Directive represents yet another delay in a highly protracted process that has to balance the need for reform of the first IORP Directive, the interests of occupational pensions and the insurance industry, as well as the Commission’s desire, as a lead global initiator of financial services legislation, to test the limits of its competence in harmonising EU laws.
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Features
Focus Group: Still life in the ‘supercycle’
Eighteen respondents (56%) to this month’s Off The Record survey had commodities or commodity futures in their portfolio.
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Features
Long live the deal...
The Dutch pension deal, as such, is off the table. But despite all the political turmoil, a working group representing experts, government, supervisors and various stakeholders has continued to hammer out the details of the new system, resulting in the long-awaited outline presented on 30 May. The pension deal is dead. Long live the pension deal.
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Features
The managed decline of DB pension funds
The death of defined benefit (DB) funds has, in some form, been prophesied for decades, but the latest threat of closure – stemming from the publication of statutory guidelines on Ireland’s new funding standard – may well prove to be a real and insurmountable threat to final salary schemes in the country.
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Features
Schemes get on track for central clearing
The European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR) – like most new legislation – has its share of critics. It will hit derivatives players, of course, who have lamented the increased costs the new rules will entail. But it could also have a deep impact on pension funds and their governance.
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Features
Brussels pulls a Green Paper out of its hat
The pension industry’s lobbying campaign over the revised IORP Directive seems to be bearing fruit. Not only has Brussels agreed to postpone the publication of a draft version of the Directive until next summer, the Commission is also set to launch a Green Paper on long-term investing.
