All Features articles – Page 105
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Features
Have bond markets become myopic?
In this month’s commodities report we address two phenomena – the slowdown and transition of China’s economy, and the US shale gas revolution – that could profoundly change our entire macroeconomic framework.
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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.
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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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Look closely in the land of the cuckoo clock
Switzerland. Picture perfect, with its snow-capped mountains, glistening lakes and clean air. In fact, air pollution is a major environmental concern in Switzerland.
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Features
Risky business
Some 43% of the respondents to this month’s Off The Record survey had investments that were not benchmarked. Of those respondents that did, it is no surprise that illiquid and non-listed assets dominated – real estate, infrastructure and private equity – along with some absolute return and cash mandates.
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Features
Smooth operators
The Swiss are taking pains to make their banks as risk-free as possible to ensure client loyalty, finds Iain Morse
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Features
Moment of reckoning
The 300 Club, a grouping of leading investment professionals, believes that modern portfolio theory and practice are failing institutional investors at a time when depressed funding levels require smarter ways of investing. It has issued its first paper, The Death of Common Sense, written by Amin Rajan, a member of the 300 Club and a regularcontributor to IPE. We asked him some questions
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Features
Straitened times, new measures
This year’s IPE Top 400 Asset Managers survey charts a flatlining global asset management industry with total AUM of €36.3trn at end-2011, a whisker up from the previous year’s total of €36.2trn. And despite striking a rare note of optimism in this month’s magazine as we report projections for the Turkish pension market to grow to €100bn in 10 years, the outlook is also gloomy for Europe’s pension markets. European institutional assets were down 3.5% in 2011, according to our survey.
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Features
A safe harbour
Nina Röhrbein spoke with Cees Blokzijl, director of pensions at Vopak Pension Fund, about the interaction between the fund and its fiduciary manager
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Features
Faith in the long term
A notable feature of the institutional investors’ panel at the Milken Global Conference in Los Angeles at the end of April was a faith in the ability of investors to reap long-term risk premia and a determination to do so.
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Features
Restless continent
Africa is set for a busy year of elections – and it has already experienced an old-fashioned coup. Charlotte Adlung assesses the political risks behind the investment opportunities
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Features
Regulation more worrying than contagion
News last month that JP Morgan Chase reported more than $2bn (€1.6bn) in trading losses brought to mind the fears of 2008, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers shook the financial world to its core. But the main difference between now and then is that participants in the derivatives market seem more concerned about new regulation than about the threat of contagion.
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Features
From our perspective: The belt tightens
Europe’s economic turmoil is depressing defined benefit (DB) pension funding levels as yields drop and coverage ratios move in tandem. The fall in the 30-year euro swap rate from 2.54% to 2.19% between 25 Apr and 15 May makes certain that rights cuts will have to take place at Dutch pension funds, which have little hope of recovery in the short term. UK pension funding levels, and those in other countries, have also moved south, with implications for asset allocation and policy making.
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Features
Bad news travels
Thanks to potential underfunding, most Dutch pension schemes have already announced they will cut pension payments.
