All Features articles – Page 60
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Features
Governance Practices: Between rhetoric and reality
Without behavioural change, recent adaptations in the governance practices of European pension plans merely amount to re-spraying an old car when an entirely new model is needed, according to Sally Bridgeland and Amin Rajan
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Features
Focus Group: Too much debt around
Just over half of the respondents to this month’s focus group are restructuring, or planning to restructure, their fixed-income portfolio. Of these, 10 are moving towards a more active management.
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Features
Nordic Asset Allocation: Finding the answers from within
The increased use of internal investment resources by Nordic investors is a challenge for asset managers, according to Albert Løchte Jensen
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Features
Asset Allocation: The big picture
Eight years since the banking system threatened collapse, financial markets are still dominated by central banks. Though macro fundamentals, and geopolitics, still have the capacity to influence flows, interest rates are largely being driven by the central banks’ actions.
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Features
Ahead of the Curve: Time to embrace robots?
Robotics and automation are no longer sci-fi, they are a fast-growing and profitable sector, say Johan Van Der Biest and Rudi Van den Eynde
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Features
Pensions Accounting: Numerology signals
Seventy. Zero. Minus-80. We are probably going to be seeing and hearing a lot about those numbers in the coming weeks. Just as 666 is said to represent The Beast, 70, zero and minus-80 look set to epitomise monster pension deficits and the dawning chasm between IAS 19 scheme deficits and the reality of stewarding a pension scheme.
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Features
Danish Reform: The 2025 Plan
The government of Denmark – a country ranked, according to the Melbourne Mercer Global Pensions index, as having the best pension system in the world – is planning to push funded pensions coverage into new territory.
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FeaturesIPE Expectations Indicator October 2016
The current survey period captured the end of the summer. The number of managers voicing concern about interest rate policy is high. However, the current environment has yet to reflect the alarms of many major investors and the survey results indicate most managers expect little dramatic near-term movement. Whether it is not yet the season for action, or investors expect the status quo to continue, is yet unclear.
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FeaturesESG: Green bonds get G20 boost
The green bond market has had a strong run in the wake of the December 2015 Paris climate-change agreement
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Features
Sharp tools needed
Some contend that book reserve pensions took root in Germany because funded pensions, such as they were, had been wiped out in the hyperinflation of the 1920s
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Features
Pension funds should review LDI strategies
Several UK asset managers that specialise in liability-driven investment (LDI) strategies have underperformed their benchmarks this year. This has put a strain on their pension scheme clients’ funding deficits at the worst possible time
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FeaturesHow we run our money: Nationwide Pension Fund
Mark Hedges, CIO of the UK’s Nationwide Pension Fund, tells Carlo Svaluto Moreolo about the fund’s alternative assets portfolio
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Features
ESG: Trickle-up dynamics
How much ESG regulation starts its life as an EU directive and how much is introduced by individual member states? Jonathan Williams investigates
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Features
Diary of an Investor: Project Waffle
For some months now, the powers that be here at Wasserdicht headquarters have been looking at moving our Dutch pension fund over the border to Belgium
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Features
Macro Matters: Globalisation is dead
Bob Swarup traces cycles of globalisation and deglobalisation in recent centuries and concludes that the world is now turning towards Deglobalisation 2.0
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FeaturesInterview: Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel prize in 2002 for insights from cognitive psychology that provided the basis for behavioural economics
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Features
SWFs confound the sceptics
Despite reports that sovereign wealth funds are cashing in their assets to cope with falling oil prices, the sector is still growing
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Features
EC heeds concerns over EMIR sovereign-bond collateral rule
Pension schemes could be exempt from a diversification requirement relating to the use of sovereign bonds as collateral for non-centrally cleared derivatives
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Features
Quantitative Easing: UK trustees locked in vicious circle
The Bank of England’s decision to re-launch its quantitative easing (QE) programme in August, has seen defined benefit deficits across the country’s 6,000 schemes rise to unprecedented levels
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Features
ESG: VW scandal presents choices
Investors in the scandal-hit German carmaker must make a choice between collective or individual action, or sitting out for the time being, according to Johan Polet and Jonathan Bakkers
