All IPE articles in November 2002 (Magazine)
View all stories from this issue.
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Features
Outsourcing of e60bn mooted
Concerns about the medium term solvency of the Spanish social security system have been actively discussed not only in Spain but also in Brussels. At the end of last year the European Commission said that the Spanish government was not providing enough detailed information regarding the long term sustainability of ...
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Features
Value added alternatives to index tracking
As large company growth stocks surged in the late nineties, institutional investors in the US, UK and elsewhere became increasingly disenchanted with traditional active investment managers. This was especially so with those espousing a value style of investing, because they were generally underweighted in these stocks and so underperformed the ...
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Features
Resilient in adversity
Passive management has had its fair share of knockers in the last few months. Consider the recent assertion by Paul Woolley, chairman of fund manager GMO Woolley, that passive investment may be popular, but that it is undermining equity returns and promoting market bubbles and implosions. Woolley argued that by ...
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Features
Nightmare on ALM street
American defined benefit (DB) pension funds may become the next nightmare for US corporations. David Blitzer, chairman of Standard & Poor’s index committee, predicts that pension contributions will replace stock options as the big corporate accounting issue next year. The almost three year severe stock market downturn has deeply damaged ...
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Features
Out of one comparto and into another
One sign that the new occupational DC plans in Italy are shifting into a higher gear is the beginning of a move from monocomparto schemes, which offer members a single line of investment – usually a balanced portfolio – to multicomparto schemes that offer a choice of investments. Investment choice ...
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Features
Finding a place of asset managers
A pervading atmosphere of gloom surrounded Sibos, the annual operations conference of the financial messaging operator Swift, at Geneva in early October. The twin conference themes – resilience and value – did little to stimulate any real debate and the economic downturn had cast a pall over the 250 companies ...
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Features
Benign Belgian flexibility
Market volatility has not precipitated any sharp changes of direction among Belgian pension funds, according to Hervé Noël the head of portfolio management at Tractebel Pension Funds in Brussels. Furthermore, the regulator, the Office de Controle des Assurances/Controledienst voor Verzekeringen (OCA/CDV) is using a light hand on the tiller. “Until ...
