All articles by Liam Kennedy – Page 18
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NewsPension funds reveal top ten success criteria
EUROPE – Pension Fund Perception Report gives insight on how funds measure satisfaction with managers.
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NewsDeveloped economies should expect future GDP growth of 'just 1%'
EUROPE – Real GDP growth of 2.5% in developed markets over last 30 years an anomaly, says Research Affiliates.
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NewsCoal Pension Trustees Investment expands in-house investment team
Investment arm for coal industry pension funds creates new role of head of portfolio construction.
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NewsAlarm call: Ultra-low interest rates
Persistently low rates are taking their toll on pension funding levels throughout Europe.
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Interviews
The implementation game
Russell’s recent move to Seattle from its historic location in Tacoma, Washington, just a few miles to the south, had the inevitable effect of pleasing urbanite employees happy to work and live in the bigger city and inconveniencing others who liked the old panoramic view over Commencement Bay and who faced a longer commute or higher real estate prices.
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Features
Alarm call
Persistently low rates are taking their toll on pension funding levels throughout Europe. Now they have forced authorities in three European countries – Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden – to act to shore up pension funding, to allow providers to meet their guarantees, or to avoid benefit cuts.
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Features
Straitened times, new measures
This year’s IPE Top 400 Asset Managers survey charts a flatlining global asset management industry with total AUM of €36.3trn at end-2011, a whisker up from the previous year’s total of €36.2trn. And despite striking a rare note of optimism in this month’s magazine as we report projections for the Turkish pension market to grow to €100bn in 10 years, the outlook is also gloomy for Europe’s pension markets. European institutional assets were down 3.5% in 2011, according to our survey.
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NewsThe difficulty of building an efficient pensions system
Sometimes it takes a downturn to tackle inefficiencies that go unnoticed when times are good.
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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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NewsPensionsfonds, 10 years on
Germany's investment set-up is as infuriatingly complex to outsiders as the country's fiscal system.
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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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Special Report
Europe's Pension Consultants: Firmly in the advisory camp
Chris Ford tells Liam Kennedy why Towers Watson isn’t about to pitch itself as a fiduciary manager
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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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Features
Alphabet soup
The UK’s pensions minister, Steve Webb, is brave to try to keep alive the concept of pensions risk sharing. At the annual chairman’s dinner of the National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF) in February, he advocated what he termed ‘defined aspiration’ or ‘DA’ pensions to add to the already familiar DB and DC.
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Features
Leader of the supertanker
ABP transformed itself in 2008 when it spun off APG to become an independent pension asset manager that could also manage assets for external pension funds.
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Features
Change without regret
Liam Kennedy spoke with Angelien Kemna, chief investment officer of APG, the Netherlands’ largest pension asset manager with AUM of €278bn, about her policies of ‘minimum regret’ and ‘controlled simplification’
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NewsEFRP rejects notion of 'harmonising' European DB pensions systems
Timetable for ‘holistic balance sheet’ impact study ‘inadequate’, says Towers Watson.
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NewsEIOPA unveils timetable for 'holistic balance sheet' impact studies
Authority plans decision just six weeks after receiving 3,000 pages of submissions from 170 bodies.
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Features
‘Democracy will be threatened if you lose grip on public finances’
Former Swedish prime minister Göran Persson recalled the night in 1997 when the EU’s Stability and Growth pact was negotiated. His cabinet had already made the decision that Sweden would not join. “We had decided we were not mature enough to join this club, so we would wait. But even then, we were in much better shape than many of those who took it as a given that they should join the euro-zone.”
