All Features articles – Page 96
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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 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
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
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
The coup de grace
Roxane McMeeken met with John Kyriakopoulos, the man whose huge bet on Greek bonds paid off dramatically for the country’s largest pension institution
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Features
Waterford Crystal: shattered illusions of safety
When famed manufacturer Waterford Crystal went into insolvency in 2009, it set in motion events that affected pension funds in Ireland and the UK.
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Features
Fallout from Ruslan and Cyprisia
Iain Morse assesses the consequences of the Cyprus bailout for the banking and wider financial services industries
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Features
Danish fund reverses stance on foreign equity
Foreign listed equities are again being targeted by Denmark’s DKK600bn (€80.5bn) statutory pension fund ATP, having sold off all such holdings two years ago. Since then, the listed equities portfolio has consisted of only domestic shares. ATP’s CIO Henrik Gade Jepsen says that, in the long term, the fund will focus on building up its foreign equity exposure.
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Features
Keeping hold of deferred members
Pension funds need a robust strategy to keep track of deferred members and to communicate with them in the right way. Gail Moss reports
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Features
Unsubtle financial repression
Dutch politicians are acutely aware of the size and importance of pension funds and want pension assets to be channelled back into the domestic economy.
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Features
The vain search for harmony
The European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) dropped something of a bombshell in early April with its preliminary results for the first quantitative impact study (QIS) on the revised IORP Directive.
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Features
They want our money
In the Netherlands, our politicians want our money. They’ve got some of it already, in the form of our government bond holdings, and now they want some more.
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Features
Satellites in orbit
Christoph Ryter, CEO of the Swiss retail group Migros’ Pensionkasse, explains his fund’s diversification strategy to Nina Röhrbein
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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
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
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
Diary of an Investor: It’s all about feeling in control
Our friends at PensionKøbenhavn have been visiting us here in Amsterdam. Last year, our two boards signed a mutual co-operation agreement with our Danish counterparts to start investment joint ventures. More informally, we both hope that we will also benefit from regular sharing of investment knowledge and experiences.
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Features
A few words of advice…
As the International Accounting Standards Board and the International Financial Reporting Standards Interpretations Committee continue to deliberate the discount-rate objective in IAS 19, Stephen Bouvier invited Falco Valkenburg, one of Europe’s leading consultant actuaries to set out the challenges facing the standard setters
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Features
Is Antifragile applicable to pensions?
Conrad Holmboe and Patrick O’Sullivan apply Taleb’s ‘antifragile’ idea to the pension fund world
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Features
Bridgewater rated highest at IPE’s inaugural asset manager awards
Bridgewater Associates received the top commendation in the first IPE Pension Fund Perception Programme (PFPP) Awards for asset managers, winning the accolade for the manager highest rated by clients.
