All Features articles – Page 96
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Features
Confusion reigns supreme
The Cypriot bailout may have only been a drop in the ocean compared with the Greek rescue package. But, as Jonathan Williams finds, lack of detail is a major headache for the local provident funds even three months later
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Features
Transition management for China
European politicians like to meet with Jin Liqun, chairman of the board of supervisors of China Investment Corporation. As a man with more than $400bn (€309.2bn) in assets for investment outside China, they have been actively courting his fund’s capital.
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Features
The fallacy of CB independence
Central banks are no longer independent of politics, argues Kommer van Trigt, and investors should take that into account
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Features
Caution in the face of opportunity
Despite the growing clamour for funding, pension funds remain cautious about investing in infrastructure. Michael Wilkins analyses some of the barriers holding back potential investors
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Features
The bankers’ new clothes … yet to be made
Bankers have, in recent years, become the butt of many jokes and the scapegoats for all that went wrong in the financial crisis.
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Features
The banker blame game
As if pension funds and other institutional shareholders did not already have enough on their plates, the calls on them to engage more with companies have been increasing in volume over the last few years.
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Features
Leave asset mix to pension funds
Despite Kees van Dijkhuizen’s conclusion that there is support for increased involvement from Dutch institutional investors for financing residential mortgages through state-guaranteed bonds, the IMF seems to have vindicated pension funds’ initial reluctance.
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Features
Motherhood and apple pie
Perhaps it should not be a too much of a surprise that 68% of Swiss people voted in a national referendum in March in favour of a motion against ‘rip-off’ executive salaries.
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FeaturesUnlocking alpha
New statistical techniques and the computing power to put them to work is opening a space for effective factor modelling of hedge funds, writes Robert J Frey
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Features
We were all caught naked
IPE hosted Stanford Business School’s Anat Admati this month, in town promoting The Bankers’ New Clothes, the well-received book she co-wrote with Martin Hellwig of the Max Planck Institute.
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Features
Accounting: Hoogervorst decrees
Unless you are an actuary, trustee or policy wonk, it is unlikely that the IASB’s conceptual framework project – the basis for International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) – is high on your agenda.
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Features
Manager selection in a volatile world
Amin Rajan and Roland Meerdter find that short-term performance is the primary motivation behind the selection of managers and funds
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Features
Grappling with private equity
Of the 24 respondents to this month’s Off The Record survey that hold private equity investments, 15 were happy with the number of individual fund commitments that their fund had in its portfolio. Of these, four felt they needed to re-balance the strategies. A Danish fund commented: “Investment costs have ...
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Features
Condemning ‘beautiful’ Dutch pensions
The Netherlands’ Social Economic Council (SER) has proposed a ‘macro-stable’ discount rate for pension liabilities. This new discount rate would apply to real, conditional pensions – a new type of pension contract favored by the SER that would replace existing nominal guaranteed pension rights.
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Features
Playing it safe
Nina Röhrbein interviews Bernard Caroyez of the Belgian pension fund Pensio B
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Features
Stuck in the middle
The mezzanine-debt opportunity has not gone away. But Martin Steward finds that success will probably depend on both greater focus and flexibility
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Features
Inflexion point
Finance directors, policy makers and academics already regret the period – right up until the 1990s – in which corporations and governments made what now seem extravagant pension promises to baby boomers.
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Features
Surviving in a fat-tail world
According to Nassim Taleb, we are living in a fat-tail world where extreme events are common, while our ability to predict them is nil. Mariska van der Westen asked him how pension funds can survive in such an environment
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Features
The EU-thanasia of the rentier
It was hardly a happy coincidence that the EC’s consultation paper on the long-term financing of Europe’s economy was published on the same day that the Cypriot bank ‘bail-in’ was agreed – but it was surely an instructive one.
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Features
Once upon a time in the East
It may not quite be cowboy capitalism, but a showdown is due in China, writes Gary Greenberg
