All Features articles – Page 104
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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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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
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
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
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
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
Speed is good
Richard Olsen argues that, far from slowing down, transaction volumes need to increase by a factor of thousands, and that pension funds should benefit from its uncorrelated alpha
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Features
The long haul
Speaking a little over 200 days into his tenure as EFRP secretary general, Matti Leppälä was a busy man. His secretariat was working on its response to the quantitative impact study of EIOPA (the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority) on the holistic balance sheet proposal, and he was looking forward to the Brussels close season when the city’s politicians, officials and interest groups head for Europe’s holiday spots.
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Features
Lost horizons
The growing gap between trading and investing is changing the face of equity markets, argues Per Lovén
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Features
Who turned out the lights?
Dark liquidity, which started as a way to hide big trades,now mostly offers liquidity in bitty, small packages. But Martin Steward finds signs that the pendulum is swinging back again
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Features
Making a virtue out of necessity
While investors have grown weary of new risks, they are unwilling to forego a bargain when they see it, according to Jim McCaughan and Amin Rajan
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Features
Steadying the ship
Andrew Waring of the UK Merchant Navy Officers Pension Fund tells Nina Röhrbein how the 2008 financial crisis led to a fiduciary management structure
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Features
Over-funded, over 2008… and over here
US players are set to rule distressed Europe, writes Jennifer Bollen, but local players could offer crucial cultural advantages
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Features
Back to 4%?
Mariska van der Westen outlines the Netherlands’ proposed ‘ultimate forward rate’ within the new framework for pension funds, which aims to marry real and nominal objectives
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Features
Pensions Accounting: Willingly deceived
The world wants to be deceived and deceived it will be. The Roman satirist Petronius’s acerbic critique of human nature is a convenient introduction to an issue in front of the IFRS interpretations committee in May. It all starts with a letter from the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA).
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Features
Against the grain
Mike Weston of Daily Mail & General Trust Pension Scheme tells Nina Röhrbein about his fund’s forward-looking approach to investment decision making
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Features
Alarm call
Persistently low rates are taking their toll on pension funding levels throughout Europe. Now they have forced authorities in three European countries – Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden – to act to shore up pension funding, to allow providers to meet their guarantees, or to avoid benefit cuts.
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Features
Defined ambition and supervision
The Dutch pension sector is working on new pension contracts, with softer benefits as the expected outcome. Meanwhile, the European Commission has planned to revise the IORP Directive and European supervision of pension funds. Dick Boeijen, Niels Kortleve and Jan-Willem Wijckmans ask if these processes are compatible
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Features
Toxic assets, or toxic prices?
Charlotte Moore finds that the anticipated flow of bank assets is more likely to be a trickle – thanks to the very regulation that was supposed to open the floodgates
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Features
Diary of an Investor: Back to the future
A few weeks ago I phoned an old colleague of mine from years back. Jean-Pierre is from Paris.
