All IPE articles in July 2011 (Magazine)
View all stories from this issue.
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Features
Risk abides, man changes his mind
Financial risks grow and subside with economic cycles but always remain. Human attitudes towards them also vary. Arguably they matter more and often change the most. Allianz Global Investors’ first RiskMonitor survey, conducted in conjunction with IPE, paints a picture of pension funds’ current attitudes to risk and how they are changing.
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Features
An avarice for absolute return
Pirkko Juntunen looks at the unique pension investment policy employed by Swedish construction company Skanska
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Features
Actual results may vary
On Friday 10 June, the Dutch government, together with employer and employee representatives, signed a comprehensive agreement to drastically reform the Dutch pension system.
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Interviews
‘Adjacency’, or the art of step-by-step
It is tempting, just because it is so good at it, to think of the $11bn (€7.8bn) London-based hedge fund manager CQS as a credit specialist. But founder Michael Hintze is keen to emphasise its broader strengths. “We are a big hedge fund, but we do more than simply provide absolute returns in credit,” he says. “Nowadays we are a global multi-strategy, multi-asset management firm providing hedge fund, long only and bespoke solutions for clients.”
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Features
Not everyone loves the Pensions Agreement
After much wrangling, heel-dragging and finger-pointing, the Dutch government and social partners have hammered out a Pensions Agreement. In mid-June, the social partners and the cabinet unveiled an agreement that aims to increase the official retirement age for the first pillar (AOW) to 66 in 2020 and to 67 in 2025. First pillar benefits will be raised an extra 0.6% annually, amounting to indexation in line with real earned wages, a major demand of umbrella union FNV. Early retirement will remain an option, but against a loss of 6.5% of the AOW for each year.
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Features
AIMA pushes for increased alignment
Eat your own cooking – that is the advice of CalPERS’s Kurt Silberstein, who recommends hedge fund managers add a little more of themselves to the pot if they want to entice pension funds to the table. In common parlance, hedge funds must do more to ‘align interests’ with investors.
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Asset Class Reports
Structured Credit: Alphabet soup: a second helping
Joseph Mariathasan takes a look at the structured credit and loans markets and finds a surprising abundance of reasons to tuck back into the alphabet soup, even after significant spread-tightening
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Features
Should fiduciaries manage assets?
Anton Van Nunen writes on the changing role of fiduciary managers. Should they manage pension assets themselves despite the potential conflict of interest?
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Features
Bernardino: Solvency II not a simple exercise
With the introduction of Solvency II less than a year and a half away, the pensions industry is still unclear what kind of regime it will face and how aspects of the Directive, drafted for insurance companies, may be applied to diverse European pensions.
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Features
Diary of an Investor: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
We Dutch value consensus – perhaps we even need it in the way we need our dikes and polders to manage our low-lying lands.
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Country Report
Italy: The guard changes at Cometa
As Fabio Ortolani steps down from the Cometa pension scheme ahead of August’s management elections, Carlo Svaluto Moreolo offers an appraisal of his term and the issues that the new team will have to focus upon
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Features
Pointless chatter
Without any irony, the IASB is about to give you the opportunity to take part in a consultation process on the future shape of its entire work plan. As a 15 June IASB meeting paper explains: “The consultation process was introduced by the trustees of the IFRS Foundation in 2010 in response to comments received during the constitution review of the IFRS Foundation.” A good time to revisit pension plan measurement? Reality check.
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Special Report
The future of cleantech
Investors in the cleantech industry are not just funding the development of environmentally conscious business, argues Paul Corren. While the technology is developed to do that, it is also focused on reducing costs and improving efficiency
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Opinion Pieces
Lee Hollingworth - Head of Defined Contribution at Hymans Robertson
“In our view, the open market option should be the default for all schemes”
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Features
Convergence over harmonisation
Niels Kortleve, Barthold Kuipers and Wilfried Mulder offer reasons why the European Commission should focus on convergence of EU pension regulation rather than harmonisation
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Features
Pressure to scale up to hold down costs
Gail Moss looks at how multinational companies are grappling with pension scheme underfunding in the face of rising longevity pension scheme underfunding in the face of rising longevity
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Features
Opening up custody
Planned merger of Russia’s rival exchanges could clear the way for securities lending, writes Iain Morse
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Features
Easier said than done
Often the solution to a problem is as complex as the problem itself. And a lot of things are easier said than done.
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Features
Systemic reforms just a utopian dream
Experts and analysts believe the idea of a systemic reform of France’s pension industry faces major hurdles and that it is unlikely to be implemented due to funding and political wrangling. They also say that building up a new pension regime from scratch would be the best way to simplify the French system and avoid increasing the deficit.
