All Features articles – Page 86
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Features
Triumph of hope over experience
Book review: Money Mania: Booms, Panics and Busts from Ancient Rome to the Great Meltdown, Bob Swarup (Bloomsbury, £20)
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Features
Inflated expectations
Investors often assume that inflation protection comes as standard with infrastructure investments. Vivian Nicoli warns that it depends on a number of variables and may come at the price of lower expected nominal returns
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Features
Counting on the krona
Erik Callert, chief investment officer of SPP Livförsäkring, tells Jonathan Williams how an overhaul of its portfolio left it better equipped to deal with Solvency II
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Features
Rates of change
Carolyn Tavares argues that the roller-coaster start to 2014, with its disconnect between economic indicators and bond yields, makes the case for holding to strategic, funding level-based de-risking programmes
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Features
Carrot or stick: the shift to passive
Earlier this year, the UK pension and asset management industries watched as the government revealed its vision for the 89 Local Government Pension Schemes (LGPS) in England and Wales.
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Features
Liability-Driven Investment: This sprint finish could get brutal
Things seem to have gone pretty well for UK pension schemes during 2013. A combination of rising bond yields and an equity market rally meant that, at the least, funding levels didn’t get any worse, and at best got schemes two or three percentage points closer to the finishing line.
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Features
The big picture
The dovishness of the developed markets (DM) central banks continues to be one of the main themes for capital markets.
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Features
Smaller firms, better mousetraps
While innovation can take place in companies of any size, smaller companies sometimes get the edge through fresh thinking and nimble structures. Christopher O’Dea finds that innovation opportunities are abundant both abroad and at home
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Features
Scania and the benefits of independence
Volkswagen’s bid for heavy vehicle manufacturer Scania has divided Swedish institutional investors, with the division no more apparent than among its buffer funds.
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Features
What are the benefits?
The European Commission unveiled its proposals for a uniform pension benefit statement this spring. The idea has had a mixed reception, as Gail Moss finds
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Features
Falling (further) behind
“Pensions are safe”, Germany’s one-time pensions minister, Norbert Blüm, famously said in the 1990s. That ill-judged statement still influences discussions about the German state pension system even today.
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Features
Put the trust back
Being outside the EU doesn’t mean you escape regulation. Swiss pension funds are complaining about excessive regulation – in this case, the burden is homemade and only to some extent fuelled by the financial crisis.
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Features
Another eventful summer
The Spanish Treasury joined the UK, Germany, France and Italy as the fifth European sovereign to issue inflation-linked bonds on 13 May, raising €5bn for 10-year paper that was four times oversubscribed.
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Features
Ongoing FTK delay annoys pensions sector
Tensions are rising in the Dutch pensions sector. Every day that details for the new financial assessment framework (FTK) fail to appear – let alone pass Parliament – pension funds, providers, advisers and asset managers must anxiously weigh their options.
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Features
On the naughty step
Moves by members of the European Parliament to subject accountancy bodies to greater political scrutiny spell trouble for the IFRS Foundation, writes Stephen Bouvier
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Features
The mission for pensions reform
Eleven years have passed since the European pensions industry digested, welcomed and, in some cases, bemoaned the Directive for Institutions for Occupational Retirement Provision, or IORP I as it became known. This year, the European Commission once again took up the arduous task of updating this Directive, publishing its legislative agenda before submitting it to the European trialogue machine.
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Features
Can the EC play a long-term game?
As part of the European Commission’s reinvigorated attempt to promote future investment in key economic areas, it has now produced a legislative agenda for the long-term financing of investment.
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Features
Credit where it’s due
Of the 22 investors polled for this month’s Focus Group, seven feel that credit has become more important in their fund’s portfolio over the past five years, and a further 10 believe it has become slightly more important. Only two rate credit as less important.
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Features
Focus Group: Credit where it’s due
Of the 22 investors polled for this month’s Focus Group, seven feel that credit has become more important in their fund’s portfolio over the past five years, and a further 10 believe it has become slightly more important. Only two rate credit as less important.
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Features
Pension perceptions programme puts pension funds in control
Following the successful completion of an initial development stage in 2012-13, IPE has now announced the full European roll-out of the Pension Fund Perception
