Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 708
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Features
Drive to increase pensions coverage
If anyone should be purring, it is Anne Maher, of the Pensions Board in Ireland, where she is chief executive. Last month, the new Pensions Act passed through both houses of parliament and was signed by president McAleese. This was the culmination of five years of work for the Pensions ...
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Features
Watching the mighty fall
“High Yield Walloped Treasuries” – the headline on a recent Merrill Lynch research paper describing the huge outperformance enjoyed by the US High Yield sector over 10-year US Treasury bonds during the month of March. Sadly for the European counterpart, there have been no such headlines over here. In fact ...
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Features
Playing tag with US
Deep-seated domestic economic problems still dog the Japanese market, and strategists says these factors are not going to evaporate just yet. But corporate earnings are improving. In the absence of major developments on the home front, equity strategists say they expect to see Japanese share prices playing tag to the ...
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Features
Dutch stick by their guns
Pension funds in the Netherlands are reviewing their position. Both the investment and liabilities sides of this very developed market are under scrutiny after a prolonged period of disappointing investment returns and diminishing pension reserves. A model to follow for other European countries when it comes to pension provision, the ...
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Features
Pension funds score better
All compulsory industry-wide pension funds in the Netherlands have ‘passed’ the first performance test of the Z-score system introduced in 1998. The results were published last month by the Asociation of Industry-wide Pension Fund (VB) and the Company Pension Fund Organisation (OPF) Under the Z-scores system pension fund boards have ...
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Features
Rating moves into pensions
A decade ago, few participants in European capital markets would have recognised the term credit rating and fewer still within the pensions sector. Today, credit ratings are an increasingly recognised component of investors’ tool-box, but are only just beginning to emerge in a pensions context. Credit ratings are opinions from ...
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Features
Lessons from the Merrill/Unilever case
Apart from FRS17, the two big events in 2001 for UK pension funds were the Myners Report in March and the Unilever/Merrill trial from October to December. If they shared one thing in common, it was that they referred extensively to the way we measure performance of pension funds, and ...
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Features
A life more rewarding
As defined contribution (DC) schemes become more popular with companies, it is increasingly important that they provide satisfactory investment and education programmes for their members to enable them to make suitable decisions about their long-term pension savings. An appropriate long-term strategy for a DC plan differs in many ways from ...
