All Features articles – Page 340
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Features
Going out on a ratings limb
Across the globe, CEOs and CFOs have been ‘feeling the heat’ for some time. The corporate and personal implications and repercussions of the prolonged slowing of the world economy, the Enron scandal and other stories, the Sarbanes Oxley Act and the sustained decline in equity prices over the past three ...
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Features
TNO sticks to its guns
There are not many pension plans in the Netherlands that represent workers across such an eclectic diversity of private/government entities ranging from the qualitative labelling of fruit and vegetables through to the technicians in vehicle crash-test dummy laboratories. This is because the TNO organisation is founded by law in The ...
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Features
Italian resurgence
Change in Italy is natural. As Dante famously wrote in the Divine Comedy: “The customs and fashions of men change like leaves on the bough, some of which go and others come.” Unless, that is, you’re talking about Italian pension reform. Few Italian governments over the years have strayed near ...
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Features
Strengthening the second pillar
Slovakia is set to overhaul its entire pensions system, introducing a second-pillar privately funded plan alongside changes to its existing first and third pillar systems. The new proposal is a more radical version of the previous government’s attempts at pensions reforms, which in any case fell by the wayside after ...
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Features
Sharing the upside
Inherently the concept of performance fees is appealing. The plan sponsor only pays for performance when the manager delivers, and the manager has additional motivation to perform. However, a lower fee is poor compensation for cost of the poor performance it accompanies, and managers, in the pursuit of higher performance, ...
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Features
Dutch funds go deeper into red in 2002
Dutch pensions funds results for 2002 do not make for pretty reading, as the negative returns for 2002 following on a dismal 2001 have pushed some funds below the high watermark line of the strong buffer reserves designed to absorb the severest of market shocks. The unprecedented declines heralded in ...
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Features
Irish launch for Mercer 360
Mercer Investment Consulting has launched a new product allowing smaller Irish pension funds access to international investment managers. The new service, Mercer 360, combines the investment consulting experience of Mercer with the fund management skills of Attica Asset Management. Attica provides manager of manager products in the UK, and is ...
