All articles by Liam Kennedy – Page 19
-
Features
Fighting talk
Pension funds see remuneration from two different but uniquely intertwined perspectives. As institutional investors, they are under increasing pressure to hold companies, including banks, to account over executive pay.
-
Features
Shock factor
Liam Kennedy spoke with Theo Kocken and Kerrin Rosenberg about pensions, behavioural finance and a new definition of fairness
-
Features
Soft and hard factors
Daily, at thousands of pension funds, judgements are formed on asset managers. Those managers may largely be hired and fired on the basis of hard numbers, but relationships are assessed (and sustained through hard times or otherwise curtailed) on the basis of a combination of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ factors. Tough economic and market conditions increase the importance of those factors. But which ones do pension funds pay closest attention to?
-
NewsTomorrow's long-term capitalists
Many of tomorrow's long-term capitalists will not be the same ones as today's.
-
Features
The long haul
Speaking a little over 200 days into his tenure as EFRP secretary general, Matti Leppälä was a busy man. His secretariat was working on its response to the quantitative impact study of EIOPA (the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority) on the holistic balance sheet proposal, and he was looking forward to the Brussels close season when the city’s politicians, officials and interest groups head for Europe’s holiday spots.
-
Features
Tomorrow’s long-term capitalists
The UK equity market, as Prof John Kay rightly points out in his review ‘UK Markets and Long-term Decision Making’, is no longer majority-owned by UK pension funds and insurers, and has not been for a long time.
-
NewsIORP framework could impinge on social partner agreements – EFRP
EUROPE – Brussels could be overstepping mark by imposing its views on 'regulatory certainty' for pensions.
-
NewsPension funds reveal top ten success criteria
EUROPE – Pension Fund Perception Report gives insight on how funds measure satisfaction with managers.
-
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.
-
NewsCoal Pension Trustees Investment expands in-house investment team
Investment arm for coal industry pension funds creates new role of head of portfolio construction.
-
NewsAlarm call: Ultra-low interest rates
Persistently low rates are taking their toll on pension funding levels throughout Europe.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
NewsThe difficulty of building an efficient pensions system
Sometimes it takes a downturn to tackle inefficiencies that go unnoticed when times are good.
-
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.
-
NewsPensionsfonds, 10 years on
Germany's investment set-up is as infuriatingly complex to outsiders as the country's fiscal system.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
