All Features articles – Page 335
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Features
On the rails
The emergence of infrastructure as an asset class has largely been driven by macroeconomic factors, explaining to some extent the varying stages of maturity in different countries. Traditionally governments have facilitated investment in infrastructure either by directly financing and building roads, railways, electricity grids and telephone lines, or by subsidising ...
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Features
Is this really on?
The months of July and August have long been known as ‘the silly season’ in newspaper circles. In keeping with this fine tradition comes the recent story in the Boston Globe newspaper that Citigroup is looking to purchase State Street – a story that, on the face of it, would ...
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Features
Still stressed
The Danish pension fund market has been dominated in the past few years by the Danish Financial Supervisory Authority’s (DFSA) introduction of colour-coded stress tests to assess the financial strength of life insurers and pensions institutions. The DFSA’s so-called ‘traffic light’ system works on two scenarios: a ‘red light’ under ...
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Features
Westside story
Direct or indirect? Perhaps not as lofty a question as Hamlet’s “To be or not to be?” but decision makers at US pension plans, endowments and foundations face serious choices in making real estate allocations between indirect investment vehicles and traditional direct investments. A few members of the Pension Real ...
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Features
Why Electrolux aims to go 'blue'
For a surprising number of multinationals operating in Europe, the question of their worldwide pension fund arrangements is less one of streamlining an existing structure and deciding where pan-European pension plans might fit into the equation, than actually figuring out what pension plans the corporation has in place globally and ...
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Features
Parliament's knight in shining armour
How pleased are you that the pan-European pensions directive has finally become a reality after so many years and how much of a milestone do you think its introduction really is? You can imagine that I am very happy that the Council has been able to accept all the amendments ...
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Features
The arrival of a 'miracle'
We have a saying in Germany: “miracles take a bit longer”. This saying applies perfectly to the directive. We had to wait a long time until it came into existence. It is an almost unbelievable miracle that the extremely diverse approaches to pension funding and supervisory regimes for occupational pension ...
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Features
Reducing equities but buying Asia
Many feel that we could be now at a major turning point in the equity markets. Some argue that the strong performance since mid March shows that the equity market is going for a recovery in the economy. Some indicators indeed were quite positive, first quarter company earnings were in ...
