All Features articles – Page 107
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Features
Like father, like son
Whenever my four-year-old boy asks me how old I am and I tell him the truth, I am invariably met with a look of horror that anyone, anywhere, could ever be that old. His incredulous, somewhat disgusted expression is an apt reflection of how I sometimes feel when I read reports on ageing and it dawns on me how most of us are going to be doing a lot more of it in future.
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Features
From our Perspective: Voting with their feet
Two factors have prompted the French pension fund UMR Corem and the insurer AG2R La Mondiale to seek a jurisdiction outside France for pension activities. One is the onset of Solvency II and the other, closely related, is the lack of an IORP-compliant regime in France for the provision of second-pillar pensions that would help them avoid the structures of Solvency II.
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Features
Garbage in, garbage out
If you work in accountancy you will have been far too busy since 2009 with the chaos created by David Tweedie out of the International Accounting Standards Board’s workplan to worry too much about administrative matters over at the board’s Cannon Street headquarters. That means there is a real danger that you could have missed an item on the board’s agenda for 21 March 2012 about operating procedures at the board’s International Financial Reporting Standards Interpretations Committee.
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Features
Sentiment undimmed
Frank Schnattinger outlines the key findings of IPE Institutional Investment’s 2012 survey following trends in the German-speaking institutional market
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Features
Pensionsfonds, 10 years on
It is said that more tax literature exists in German than in any other language. This may be true, but Germany’s institutional investment set-up, as well as its five occupational pensions ‘vehicles’, seems almost as infuriatingly complex to the outsider as the country’s fiscal system.
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Features
The Brussels tug-of-war continues
Getting a place at the public hearing on the revised IORP Directive in Brussels was quite a challenge. The 400 seats the European Commission set aside for the pension fund industry were all spoken for within a matter of days. Nobody wanted to miss the chance to hear what Brussels ...
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Features
The tug-of-war continues
It is difficult to argue against the notion that funded pension benefits should be well capitalised. Those who argue that the benefits should be more secure would say this is so precisely because they are such an important part of a person’s lifetime earnings. But there are plenty of arguments ...
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Features
NAPF predicts the rise of UK super trusts
The National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF) investment conference in Edinburgh last month focused on issues of scale in defined contribution (DC) schemes. Chairman Mark Hyde Harrison once again renewed his call for the launch of ‘super trusts’ – predicting that up to six of these larger vehicles could be ...
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Features
Property valuation
Any business that wants to stay in business needs to recognise revenue. And conveniently enough, recent machinations at the IASB have combined in a perfect storm of revenue recognition, the attractiveness of Far East property as an asset class, secrecy and oversight.
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Features
Boutique appeal
Two-thirds of respondents to this month’s Off The Record survey stated that their fund did not have any restrictions on allocating to boutique asset managers.
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Features
Is capital undervalued and equity a ‘stranded asset’?
Adam Smith reckoned that division of labour in a pin factory boosted productivity 4,800-fold: in manufacturing, division of labour led to a collapse in the cost of labour. Similarly, diversity in the intermediation of capital in equity markets – between high and low-frequency traders and investors with various time horizons – should reduce the cost of capital.
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Features
Custody and banking reform
Iain Morse asks whether European banking reforms will have an adverse impact on securities services providers
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Features
Flyweight in benchmark knock-out
Nina Röhrbein spoke with Gregor Hirt, head of investment for the pension fund Vorsorgestiftung Schroder & Co Bank, who explains how it punches above its weight
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Features
Low beta, high benefits
The significant outperformance of apparently ‘low-risk’ stocks over time is a well-known ‘anomaly’ in investment theory. Martin Steward asks, if it is an anomaly, won’t it eventually be corrected?
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Features
Diary of an Investor: CIO talk
It is a cold Tuesday morning in March as I land at Copenhagen’s Kastrup Airport on my way to visit Rolf at PensionKøbenhavn, one of Denmark’s most innovative pension funds, to finalise our strategic co-operation in investment matters before board ratificiation. Geert, our recent graduate appointee in the investment department, is with me.
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Features
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t
More often than not, investors are invested in some part of the food chain.And because of this they have occasionally found themselves in the dock accused of hiking up food prices through food-related commodity speculation – although research on this remains inconclusive.
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FeaturesIn defence of pro-cyclicality
Adina Grigoriu asks, is pro-cyclical risk management necessarily a cost – or can it be an unexploited source of performance?
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Features
Regulating Europe
Gail Moss reviews pension regulation and law changes under discussion in seven European countries
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FeaturesEuropean pension supervision
Dirk Broeders, Niels Kortleve, Antoon Pelsser and Jan-Willem Wijckmans assess EIOPA’s holistic balance sheet proposal
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Features
Uncertainty grows over Irish pension reforms
Irish pension funds face growing uncertainty in the current regulatory climate, with the promised revision to the minimum funding standard overdue and the introduction of sovereign annuities leaving trustees to wonder just how liable they will be for any losses incurred when using the new product.
