Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 658
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Features
Dollar's fall divides market
The recent realignment of the euro with the dollar has created clearly defined winners and losers in the Eurozone equities market. The winners are companies that import their raw materials from outside the Euro-zone while the losers are companies like semiconductors that export outside the Euro-zone. Catherine Reilly, chief economist ...
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Features
Italian resurgence
Change in Italy is natural. As Dante famously wrote in the Divine Comedy: “The customs and fashions of men change like leaves on the bough, some of which go and others come.” Unless, that is, you’re talking about Italian pension reform. Few Italian governments over the years have strayed near ...
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Features
Borsa's place in the sun
When Borsa Italiana, the Italian Stock Exchange, introduced a central counterparty (CCP) for its cash markets on 23 May, it was the latest step in a re-engineering of Italy’s post-trade environment aimed at greater integration of the country’s markets with those of Europe. The ultimate aim of a series of ...
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Features
All change ahead for spread options
European companies operating share option plans for their employees are likely to see their reported earnings reduced, if draft accounting standards come in to force. In November 2002, the UK and International Accounting Standards (IAS) Boards published draft accounting rules (FRED31 and ED2) requiring share-based payments to be recognised in ...
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Features
Deepest and most liquid market
Ask any manager of US fixed income why investors need to be invested in US fixed income and they will tell you that no bond market is so large or so wide or so deep or so liquid. Worth an estimated $7trn (E6trn) it dwarfs every other market in the ...
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Features
The bond error
Only an actuary or an accountant could think that pension liabilities are at all like fixed interest bonds, not subject to the whims of price and wage inflation. Yet Germany is about to make the same mistake that the US, Britain, and Holland have already made, of thinking that bonds ...
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Features
Three pillar foundation
Life insurers and banks offering mutual funds stand to gain most from any expansion of Greece’s funded occupational pension plans. The Greek life market is dominated by a handful of insurers. In 2001 the top four had 66% of the market, split between Interamerican (now part of the Netherlands-based consortium ...
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Features
Strengthening the second pillar
Slovakia is set to overhaul its entire pensions system, introducing a second-pillar privately funded plan alongside changes to its existing first and third pillar systems. The new proposal is a more radical version of the previous government’s attempts at pensions reforms, which in any case fell by the wayside after ...
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Features
Wall Street fall out
American pension funds will not get a penny of the $399m accused restitution fund paid by 10 of the biggest Wall Street firms found ‘guilty’ of conflicts of interest. In fact the settlement between them and the US government, following New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s investigation, should benefit ...
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Book Review
Book review: 'European Pensions & Global Finance'
Gordon Clark’s book, European Pensions and Global Finance, provides a refreshing addition to the burgeoning literature on social security and old age retirement security. Rather than offer another solution to the pending crisis, he reviews the political economy and economic geography to examine the role and status of European pension ...
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Features
Going out on a ratings limb
Across the globe, CEOs and CFOs have been ‘feeling the heat’ for some time. The corporate and personal implications and repercussions of the prolonged slowing of the world economy, the Enron scandal and other stories, the Sarbanes Oxley Act and the sustained decline in equity prices over the past three ...
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Features
TNO sticks to its guns
There are not many pension plans in the Netherlands that represent workers across such an eclectic diversity of private/government entities ranging from the qualitative labelling of fruit and vegetables through to the technicians in vehicle crash-test dummy laboratories. This is because the TNO organisation is founded by law in The ...
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Features
Luxembourg beats the trend
In 2002, Luxembourg Spezialfonds defied the generally negative volume growth in both the Luxembourg and other European investment fund markets. Fund volumes increased, contrary to expectations, by 5.5%, compared to an increase of 6.1% the previous year. Volumes in Luxembourg funds open to the general public (public funds), however, were ...
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Features
Building a pension factory
It was more than two years ago that HypoVereinsbank, the second largest German retail bank, decided to strengthen its position in the pensions area. This was a brave move at the time, as for decades pensions had been a stronghold of the insurance industry, protected by tax regulations that provided ...
