Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 351
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Opinion Pieces
Long-term Matters: Stop enabling corruption
My invitation to Prague last November had one drawback. The seminar was about corporate and political corruption. How depressing. Still, invited by the liberal Brookings Institution and the conservative American Enterprise Institute and convened by a leading US ambassador, how could I refuse?
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Features
J’en ai marre
IASB project manager Denise Durant’s opening words to the 18 January IFRS Interpretations Committee meeting were innocuous enough: “We are not discussing the proposed amendment to IAS 1 derived from the conceptual framework because this amendment was proposed directly by the board and not by the committee.” Instead, she explained, the amendment “is going to be discussed at a later stage by the board.”
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Opinion Pieces
Kees Cool, Groningen University, and Anton van Nunen, Syntrus Achmea
For the first time since the introduction of the Dutch pension law in 1954, pensioners are to be told that their pensions will be cut by 3-4% from April 2013. Also, companies might be forced to pay extra contributions. The stated reason for this is the low coverage ratios of pension funds. But that this is not correct. By calculating a wrong coverage ratio, employees and pensioners are unduly and unnecessarily hurt, and economic growth is frustrated.
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Interviews
Being long-term in a short-term world
How do you make long-term investment plans in a short-term environment?
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Features
Help trustees to stay on the ball
Gail Moss outlines how pension funds can develop training schemes to enable trustees carry out their duties competently
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Features
Alpha hunters
Nina Röhrbein spoke with Gediminas Milieska of SEB’s Lithuanian pension funds, who explains how his firm uses three types of open-ended funds to generate alpha
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Country Report
Belgium: Clarity after deadlock
After more than a year of political deadlock, Belgium’s new government has pensions in its sights. Christine Senior reports
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Features
One year later
The Tohoku earthquake of March 2011 was one of the most devastating natural disasters of recent times. Martin Steward asks if it has changed the way investors look at their Japanese equity portfolios
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Features
Keiretsu culture
Japan’s corporate governance culture has been moving, albeit slowly, towards Western models. But Nina Röhrbein finds that the Olympus scandal could lead to some push-back
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Asset Class Reports
European Equities: A stockpickers’ environment…
… if you can wait a decade for active risk to pay off. Joseph Mariathasan finds managers enjoying rich pickings for the long term, by taking account of – but also looking through – the dominant macro themes
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Asset Class Reports
European Equities: The middle way
Successful risk-taking in European equities during 2011 was more nuanced than it first appears, finds Martin Steward
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Asset Class Reports
European Equities: Two different routes to risk
How should you be positioned at the inflection point of one of the strangest economic cycles in history? Martin Steward finds the consistent performers rotating into pro-cyclical stocks in both top-down and bottom-up strategies
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Special Report
Sovereign debt in sights of ESG ratings
Nina Röhrbein finds out how the sovereign debt crisis is affecting countries’ ESG rating
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Interviews
On an ambitious journey
The name ‘AXA’ was chosen in the early 1980s, so the story goes, because it can be easily and uniformly pronounced in any language, and, as far as anyone knows, it also doesn’t mean anything rude anywhere around the world. But slick branding can’t make you good at everything, of course.
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Opinion Pieces
Politicians vs pensions
Two strongly divergent positions concerning the European Commission’s proposals for a financial transaction tax (FTT) have emerged in Brussels. Pension fund interests vehemently oppose the tax, while other parties, including some members of the European Parliament, take a diametrically opposite view.
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Opinion Pieces
Bankruptcy wave threat
A new wave of bankruptcies is set to put more pressure on the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), the US pension agency that insures pension benefits of private pension plans covering some 44m of America’s workers and retirees. For fiscal year 2011, the PBGC has already reported a record $26bn (€19.8bn) deficit – the largest in its 37-year history and $3bn more than the $23bn deficit reported the previous year.
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Features
DNB’s new interest-rate average will limit cuts
The Dutch Pension Federation, and the largest pension funds, ABP, PFZW and PMT, cautiously welcomed the pensions regulator’s recent decision to adopt a three-month interest-rate average to calculate the yield curve.
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Features
Sovereign debt crisis hits pension fund results
As pension funds across Europe release their preliminary results for 2011, the issue of the sovereign debt crisis is likely to dominate. Whether it be a shift in asset allocation – away from the few remaining periphery bonds generally held – or the fact liabilities escalated after a country’s debt ...
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Features
Revised IORP puts pensions industry on alert
Last month IPE noted that 2012 would be an important year in terms of regulation for pension funds as the industry awaits a White Paper for a revised IORP directive. Needless to say, the first few days of January have already confirmed those thoughts as the pensions industry submitted its ...
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Special Report
IPE at 15: Pension funds can shape the future of capitalism
Keith Ambachtsheer argues that pension funds are in a unique position to move capitalism in a direction that is more wealth-creating, more sustainable, less crisis-prone, and more legitimate than it is today
