All Features articles – Page 97
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Features
Two sides of the longevity balance sheet
For Peter Drucker, writing in the Harvard Business Review in 1997, demographics were “the future that has already happened”.
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Features
Battling for Poland’s second pillar
First came Hungary, then Portugal, followed by Ireland. The financial crisis has pushed governments across Europe to treat private pension savings as legitimate sources of cash to help reduce their national deficits.
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FeaturesRussian pensions are booming
Reform of Russia’s supplementary pension system is having a strong and positive impact, while further regulatory changes are on the cards for 2013, writes Alexander Lorenz
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Features
Taking risk budgeting a step further
An analytical framework at the fund selection stage can help spare DC fund participants the pitfalls of a more advanced approach to diversification, writes Thierry Roncalli
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Features
Leave nothing to chance
The advent of auto-enrolment in the UK has heightened focus on the need for robust risk management systems for DC plans. Gail Moss looks at a range of approaches
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Choosing the middle way
René Biner offers a 21-year data set that reveals surprising facts about historical loss rates in European mezzanine debt – and the advantages of vintage-year diversification
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Features
The dangers of codifying fiduciary duty
Fiduciary duty is a vague concept under UK common law that can be used in arguments both for, and against, sustainable investing.
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Is the fiduciary duty debate just for show?
It is hard to argue with the assertion that the fiduciary duty placed on investment intermediaries could be seen as a moral duty, a way of behaving, a form of conduct – to borrow a phrase recently employed by Daniel Godfrey, head of the UK’s Investment Management Association.
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Features
A tragedy of small decisions
Bob Swarup and Dario Perkins look at the latest developments in the euro-zone crisis and warn that while history doesn’t repeat itself, it does rhyme.
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Features
Quest for the ‘golden’ discount rate
We cannot foresee the long-term future, however much we would like to think we can, argues Alf Gohdes
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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
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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
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
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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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
Playing it safe
Nina Röhrbein interviews Bernard Caroyez of the Belgian pension fund Pensio B
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Features
All eyes on auto-enrolment
Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats may be consistently ahead in the polls and occupational pensions are not likely to play any role at all in the forthcoming German parliamentary elections. Yet as we report in this issue, there is a flutter of interest in auto-enrolment into workplace pensions on the part ...
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Features
A day to explain Dutch ambitions
This year we held the annual global strategy meeting of the Wasserdicht Pension Funds in the Netherlands. As this year’s organiser, I suggested a pleasant country house hotel near Hilversum.
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Features
‘Rip-off culture’ rejected by Swiss electorate
More than five years into the current financial crisis, one could be forgiven for thinking parts of the financial industry have returned to business as usual. The perception, based only in part on fact, that executive pay is rising sharply while other incomes are stagnating eventually led to the backlash ...
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Features
Article 47.3: Devil in the detail
Unintended consequences are coming to light with respect to the EMIR framework, which aims to push all trading in OTC derivatives through central clearing.
