More comment – Page 53
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Opinion Pieces
Letter from the US: Funding under pressure
Wall Street posted record highs in 2014 but this was not enough to compensate for other negative factors affecting US corporate pension plans. Their funding status dropped from 89% at the end of 2013 to 80% by the end of 2014, according to Towers Watson, and the pension deficit increased to $343bn (€303bn), doubling that of 2013. Overall pension plan funding fell by $181bn.
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NewsIPE Views: Is there an alternative to alternatives?
Pete Drewienkiewicz on why investors should simply look at asset classes based on their investment goals and objectives
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News
IPE Views: Should investors be concerned about farm animal welfare?
The treatment of company staff has long been on the radar for investors. But Joseph Mariathasan says that animal welfare is just as important
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Features
Juncker needs you!
Pension funds, take note. Jean-Claude Juncker, European Commission president, wants your money to invest in a laundry list of up to 2,000 projects.
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Opinion Pieces
Long-term Matters: Taxing questions
Tax wasn’t a material issue for ESG – let alone traditional – investors a few years ago, but now it is. So how did this happen and what does it tell us about other issues which are currently dismissed as non-material?
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Opinion Pieces
Guest viewpoint: Bernhard Wiesner - Bosch Group
Does the new IORP II Directive reflect the needs of sponsoring companies and their IORPs in Europe?
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Opinion Pieces
Letter from Brussels: Pensions in their sights
EU big shots working on how to release capital flows from funds into SMEs under the new Capital Market Union (CMU) programme should look at an existing scheme with similar aims.
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Opinion Pieces
Letter from the US: A model for future cuts?
The pension industry is concerned with the consequences of a bipartisan amendment to the $1.1trn (€924 bn) ominbus spending bill that Congress approved in December. This cuts benefits for multi-employer plan members and experts are now debating whether it is a model for further cuts across the industry.
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Features
Frozen conflict
Since a 1964 report on road pricing in the UK, authored by one RJ Smeed, the idea of charging citizens for use of public highways has been repeatedly raised in Britain.
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Features
Investors are ‘ill prepared’ for climate change
Investors are ill prepared for a loss of asset value due to climate change, according to a poll conducted at the 2014 IPE Conference.At the event, 83% of delegates said they were badly or very badly prepared for such a development.
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Features
Savvy execution is the new silver bullet
In the third article in a new series, Pascal Blanqué and Amin Rajan argue that the ex post returns no longer match the ex ante promises
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Opinion Pieces
Guest viewpoint: Con Keating - BrightonRock Group
With 78% of pension funds considering themselves long-term investors in an IPE Focus Group survey, it would be tempting to believe that dramatic progress had been made towards achieving the objectives of the Kay Review on UK equity markets.
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Opinion Pieces
Letter from the US: Data managers
Technological tools, data management, attention to governance and transparency are the most important issues for pension fund CIOs right now.
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Opinion Pieces
Every lesson helps
Here are 12 things arising from the Tesco accounting debacle that pension funds could deploy which would help prevent, or at least mitigate, similar implosions.
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Opinion Pieces
Research: Ageing demographics are an asset allocation game changer
Two of the four worst bear markets of the last century rocked the world of investing over just seven years in the last decade. They sidelined conventional wisdom on risk premia and diversification.
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Book Review
Book Review: Exploding the fairy tale
Essays in Positive Investment Management, Pascal Blanqué,
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Opinion Pieces
Guest Viewpoint: “Asset owners and managers need to address the problems in the investment industry and focus on value for the ultimate beneficiaries”
We need to move on from today’s investment world, which essentially has been built by intermediaries for intermediaries. Their purposes have become too narrow and too self-centred to be of sustainable value to asset owners, who are charged with transporting and growing savings across time – affordably, securely and fairly.
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Opinion Pieces
Letter from the US: End to pensions taboo
Pension reform is no longer a taboo subject for voters: this is one of the outcomes of the 4 November mid-term elections.
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Features
A-shares on the rise
There are signs that European institutional investors find Chinese equities interesting. Finland’s Ilmarinen now separates China equity holdings (A and H-shares), in its reports, and Denmark’s AP Pension has boosted its China equity exposure to 5%, although it has excluded domestic property and banks.
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Features
That’s about the size of it
In late September, one of the world’s largest pension funds ditched its hedge funds, and one of the world’s largest mutual funds lost its manager. One decision made sense, but not for the reasons most commentators put forward. The other made sense, despite all the focus on the nonsense surrounding it.
