Latest analysis – Page 56
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Features
Efficiency drive
A television documentary series in the UK is currently transporting British viewers back to the 1970s, an era remembered for the oil crisis but also for government energy efficiency campaigns.
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Features
From our Perspective: Voting with their feet
Two factors have prompted the French pension fund UMR Corem and the insurer AG2R La Mondiale to seek a jurisdiction outside France for pension activities. One is the onset of Solvency II and the other, closely related, is the lack of an IORP-compliant regime in France for the provision of second-pillar pensions that would help them avoid the structures of Solvency II.
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Features
Initial margin proposal for OTC derivatives
Just as Brussels had seemingly smoothed over its relations with the pension industry by granting a temporary exemption from the EMIR Directive, a new consultation paper has stirred things up. In a joint paper, the European Securities and Markets Authority, the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority and the European Banking Authority (EBA), announced that they are considering a requirement to “exchange, post or collect” initial margins for bilateral over-the-counter (OTC) derivative trades.
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Features
Not all sovereign debt is created equal
Pension funds are the cure for all ills facing the world – or so politicians would have us believe. This is true in many countries – the UK government is pushing schemes to take on infrastructure projects it cannot or will not pay for.
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Opinion Pieces
Long-term Matters: RI talk wastes time
The time and money spent on long-term, responsible investing has not been very productive. Don’t get me wrong – we’ve made important progress and our common-sense approach to change was the right (only?) place to start. But if we can learn from experience, we could be making much deeper, faster progress.
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Features
Sentiment undimmed
Frank Schnattinger outlines the key findings of IPE Institutional Investment’s 2012 survey following trends in the German-speaking institutional market
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Features
Diary of an Investor: Retirement questions
Here in the Netherlands we like to hold a special event for our colleagues when they retire. And there is usually something extra special when someone senior takes their pension.
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Features
Focus Group: Risky business
Twenty-seven respondents to this month’s Off The Record survey used liability-driven investment (LDI) strategies. On average, 63% of their liability risk was currently hedged.
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Opinion Pieces
Politics of change
The nomination of Mitt Romney as the Republican candidate to the White House may bring a lot of attention to the US pension fund industry. If he wins the election on 6 November, he could introduce a partial privatisation of Social Security, the compulsory insurance programme funded through payroll taxes. The first president to talk about privatising it was also a Republican one, George W Bush, but his proposal went nowhere.
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Features
Pensionsfonds, 10 years on
It is said that more tax literature exists in German than in any other language. This may be true, but Germany’s institutional investment set-up, as well as its five occupational pensions ‘vehicles’, seems almost as infuriatingly complex to the outsider as the country’s fiscal system.
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Features
The tug-of-war continues
It is difficult to argue against the notion that funded pension benefits should be well capitalised. Those who argue that the benefits should be more secure would say this is so precisely because they are such an important part of a person’s lifetime earnings. But there are plenty of arguments ...
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Features
The Brussels tug-of-war continues
Getting a place at the public hearing on the revised IORP Directive in Brussels was quite a challenge. The 400 seats the European Commission set aside for the pension fund industry were all spoken for within a matter of days. Nobody wanted to miss the chance to hear what Brussels ...
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Features
NAPF predicts the rise of UK super trusts
The National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF) investment conference in Edinburgh last month focused on issues of scale in defined contribution (DC) schemes. Chairman Mark Hyde Harrison once again renewed his call for the launch of ‘super trusts’ – predicting that up to six of these larger vehicles could be ...
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Features
Is capital undervalued and equity a ‘stranded asset’?
Adam Smith reckoned that division of labour in a pin factory boosted productivity 4,800-fold: in manufacturing, division of labour led to a collapse in the cost of labour. Similarly, diversity in the intermediation of capital in equity markets – between high and low-frequency traders and investors with various time horizons – should reduce the cost of capital.
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Features
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t
More often than not, investors are invested in some part of the food chain.And because of this they have occasionally found themselves in the dock accused of hiking up food prices through food-related commodity speculation – although research on this remains inconclusive.
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Features
Uncertainty grows over Irish pension reforms
Irish pension funds face growing uncertainty in the current regulatory climate, with the promised revision to the minimum funding standard overdue and the introduction of sovereign annuities leaving trustees to wonder just how liable they will be for any losses incurred when using the new product.
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Opinion Pieces
Funds join the fray
This proxy season in the US is likely to be highly politicised, with the public sector’s pension funds playing a big role. In fact, it will be a test for several rules introduced by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. In addition, the 2012 presidential campaign is getting hotter, with the Republican candidates promising to repeal the Act, if elected. The Republicans already control the House of Representatives and might conquer the Senate, too. Moreover, if Barack Obama loses, the new Republican president will be able to nominate a new Securities and Exchange Commission chairman and the SEC will change from a Democratic majority to a 3-2 Republican majority.
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NewsFrom our perspective: No Tobin for pensions
The concept of a universal financial transaction tax is a flawed one.
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Features
Big ain’t so beautiful
Since 2007, the number of Dutch pension funds has declined by about a third as more and more, predominantly small, corporate pension funds have disappeared and the total is predicted to drop to 100 by 2014.
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Features
The more you struggle…
Remember Chinese finger traps? Those childhood toys that hold your fingertipsever more tightly the more you struggle to pull them free? Europe is full of them.
