All From Our Perspective articles – Page 5
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Features
Pensions cart before the horse
It may come a surprise that the UK, Europe’s leading pension market by assets, has been one of the least innovative in terms of benefit design – something the present government is keen to rectify.
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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
Warning: contents may vary
Michel Barnier, the European Commissioner for the internal market, seems determined to end his period in office with a blizzard of activity ahead of this month’s European Par- liament elections. The (much watered down) draft directive for IORP II and a paper on long-term financing of the European economy were closely followed by a draft directive revising shareholder rights legislation, complete with a controversial proposal for a mandatory say-on-pay vote at EU listed companies.
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Features
Back to basics
The Herculean task of harmonising the funding rules for Europe’s defined benefit pension schemes has been officially decoupled from the planned IORP II Directive, to the relief of all those who would have to deal with the complex analytical framework needed to coordinate the rules. That framework would almost certainly have led to lower risk tolerance and a mass exodus from risk assets on the part of European pension funds.
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Features
Spread wealth with caution
Back in the days when the roar of Ireland’s Celtic tiger economy echoed across Europe and the wider world, the country was widely praised for its foresight in 2001 when it created a sovereign fund, the National Pension Reserve Fund, with the proceeds of the sale of Telecom Eireann.
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Features
Expect more scrutiny on systemic relevance
A transformation is taking place in the five-year performance track records of countless investment funds and strategies as this year fades out and the impact of the market collapse of late 2008 is erased.
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Features
Spotlight on money doctors
Holding investment consultants to account is a healthy exercise. And indeed, one recent study on investment consultants’ recommendations has attracted headlines and controversy.
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FeaturesPolish reform: A lot not to like
Managers of Polish pension funds can at least be grateful their industry has not been entirely nationalised
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Features
Webb’s policy challenges
The achievement may seem modest, but September 2013 marks 40 months since Steve Webb became pensions minister, a junior post within the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions, but one with far-reaching influence over the design, structure and, by extension, asset allocation of occupational pensions in UK.
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Features
End to the first act
Six years since the idea was first raised, the European Commission has finally drawn a curtain on its proposal to apply rigid risk-based solvency requirements – pillar one of Solvency II – on occupational pension funds in IORP II. At least for now, since Michel Barnier, the commissioner for the single market, has made it clear that this is a postponement, not a policy abandonment.
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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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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
Scrutiny: it’s here to stay
If you were to organise a people’s initiative against being ripped off, you might be guaranteed some measure of success. The fact that the people allegedly doing the ripping off are highly-paid executives makes the issue all the more piquant.
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Features
Not too hot, not too cold
“The Union has today set itself a new strategic goal for the next decade: to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion.”
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Features
Risk ahead!
“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war.” General Stanley McChrystal is supposed to have said this in 2010 when commenting on a PowerPoint slide outlining the risks of the US army’s engagement in Afghanistan.
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NewsFrom Our Perspective: Better the virtuous circle
Pension funds are urgently needed to finance the jobs and growth Europe desperately needs.
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Features
Better the virtuous circle
In theory, insurers, pension funds, endowments and other long-term investors will match their liability stream with long-term investments in the productive economy. So, over several economic cycles, their investments fund their liabilities, but their investments in government debt also help pay for the roads and schools that benefit current and future members and pensioners. Their equity and corporate-bond investments finance company growth and foster employment. Property and infrastructure investments help them attain real, inflation-linked cashflows, while also financing long-term economic expansion.
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Features
Generational imbalances
Nowadays, it is much harder to define the broad interest groups that are representative of a country as a whole. Previous decades were notable for the division between capital and labour, which persists in the consensual political and decision-making models of continental Europe. But tripartite decision-making between employers, unions and government now seems rather antiquated as membership of organised labour groups has declined over the past 20-30 years and western economies have deindustrialised.
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Features
In the laboratory
It’s a good rule in life to learn from the mistakes of others if you can. So what could the board of a brand new pension fund learn from others to make sure its internal design and external relationships are as robust as possible?
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Features
No short or decisive war
The essayist Robert Wilson Lynd wrote that “belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions”. The twentieth century conclusively laid to rest the notion that wars between nations would end with the symbolic exchange of border provinces or notional reparations. The economic consequences of the First World War were profound and long lasting, just as the Second World War shaped politics in ways we still see today.
