All Features articles – Page 207
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Features
Building confidence in indexation
In the Netherlands indexation of pension benefits to either wage or price increases has long been considered a guaranteed right. Although indexation used to be conditional on the pension fund’s position, in practice full indexation was virtually always given. In the communication to pension beneficiaries the possibility of indexation cuts ...
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Features
Mandatory call in Germany
The German Union Federation (DGB) has urged the government to make it compulsory for employers to offer corporate pensions to their employees. Speaking in Berlin, DGB vice chairman Ursula Engelen-Kefer said the move was necessary to, in the first place, compensate for future reductions in the state pension. As a ...
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Features
Pensions disarray on Capitol Hill
It is spring, but it already feels like November when US Congressional elections will take place. The political fall wind is already freezing any attempt to approve unpopular or controversial legislation. That explains why the US Congress left for its two-week Easter recess without approving a new pension legislation, which ...
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Features
Swaption case study for pension funds
Partly as a result of the introduction of the new Financial Assessment Framework (Financieel Toetsingskader – nFTK), pension funds are monitoring interest-rate risk. An average Dutch pension fund has a duration mismatch between its liabilities and its fixed-income investments. Several solutions have been suggested which includes buying long-dated bonds, LDI-funds ...
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Features
Caution is king
BVV is Germany’s largest Pensionskasse with total assets of €16.9bn at the end of 2004, according to data from the German regulator BaFin. Total assets were nearly three times their level in 1990 and also make BVV nearly three times the size of its nearest rival; BVV’s membership stood at ...
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Features
RIsing the EM roller coaster
It is a fallacy that the world is divided into countries that have already emerged and those that are emerging, said Roger Nightingale, economic adviser to pension funds and global strategist at Millennium Global Investments, kicking off the recent IP E-Symposium on ‘Emerging markets investing’. “The vast majority of non-emerged ...
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Features
European convergence
Eastern European stock exchanges have soared ahead in the past few years. However, we believe that they still offer good long-term potential, thanks to the beneficial impact of European convergence. This does not only apply to the countries that joined the EU last year, but also future applicants and neighbouring ...
