All IPE articles in October 2021 (Magazine)
View all stories from this issue.
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Book ReviewBooks: COVID: The first 10 weeks
Ten Weeks into COVID-19: Psyche, Money and Narratives: An interpretation of the crisis, Pascal Blanqué, Economica, 2021
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Country ReportCountry Report – Pensions in France (October 2021)
President Macron’s pension reforms were pretty much shredded by the pandemic. Asset managers and policymakers had been hoping that a successful reform programme would channel savings into supplementary pension vehicles like the FRPS. Instead, progress has been very slow indeed. We also profile the public sector scheme Ircantec and highlight Indefi’s latest research on the French institutional market.
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FeaturesIPE Quest Expectations Indicator - October 2021
The much-feared post-summer holiday effect on COVID-19 contaminations did not materialise. The current wave started earlier and statistics are already trending down in the US, EU, UK and Japan, although still at a high level. Full vaccinations are over 60% in the EU and UK, with Japan catching up fast. Emerging markets are still significantly behind in tackling the pandemic.
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FeaturesBriefing: Is equity duration risk about to step into the limelight?
In his memoirs, Sir Laurence Olivier tells how, in 1967, he was suddenly taken ill during a National Theatre production of August Strindberg’s Dance of Death. His understudy stepped into the role for just four nights, but in that short time, “.…walked away with the part of Edgar like a cat with a mouse between its teeth”. A star was born. Fifty-five years later, Sir Anthony Hopkins, with a career just as stellar as his one-time mentor, was the oldest-ever recipient of an Oscar for best actor.
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FeaturesAccounting: A costly mistake
Maybe you missed it. Or perhaps you were stuck in some interminable queue at an airport. But the United Kingdom’s audit watchdog revealed in August that a disciplinary tribunal had slapped audit giant KPMG with a £13m (€15m) fine, parked it on the naughty step with a severe reprimand, and ordered it to conduct a series of reviews into what went wrong.
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Opinion PiecesAgriculture: Time to rethink farming
The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released in August, provides grim reading. According to the summary for policymakers: “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred.”
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FeaturesAhead of the curve: The future of quant credit
The past several decades have seen quantitative strategies established as an important feature of global equity markets. In 2019, less than one quarter of the more than $30trn (€25trn) of US equities was held by human-managed funds.
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Asset Class ReportsAsset Allocation: Mixed prospects emerging
COVID and political risks may have affected EMs in different ways but there are still many opportunities in such a diverse asset class
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Opinion PiecesAn alternative pensions future
It’s no real news that ageing is changing our society in numerous ways – from simple things like product design (making smart phones for older eyes and fingers to use) to more generationally diverse workplaces.
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Country ReportIrcantec: High ESG ambitions
Ircantec’s latest four-year plan has a strong emphasis on social responsibility
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Asset Class ReportsEmerging Market Debt: Populism battles ESG in Latin America
Many policies championed by populist leaders in Latin America are in direct conflict with the ESG goals of global investors
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FeaturesLong term matters: Vaccine apartheid and investors
This column last covered COVID-19 vaccine inequity in June. Since then, using The Economist’s model of “excess deaths”, there may have been more than 4m deaths globally. That means 37,700 people dying every day, arguably unnecessarily. This number comes with many caveats but it’s possible (indeed probable) that the figure could be much higher.
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Opinion PiecesLetter from Australia: Public places, private matters
AustralianSuper marked a milestone with its successful takeover in 2019 of education provider, Navitas, for A$2.1bn (€1.3bn).
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FeaturesStrategically Speaking: Aviva Investors
Insurance-owned asset managers can be difficult to pigeonhole. Some have forged strong specialisms, often in fixed income, but now also in alternatives like property or niche credit. Others have remained a corporate backwater absorbed by group general-account assets.
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Country ReportFRPS: Awaiting lift off
France’s new form of supplementary pension fund is only gaining traction slowly
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FeaturesFixed income, rates, currencies: Not quite back to normal
As the world struggles to get back to pre-pandemic conditions, with schools and offices open, economic forecasting seems even less predictable than ever. Take August’s US payrolls report, which again confounded most forecasters. Analysts scrambled to explain why the headline job gains were so weak, particularly after the huge (forecast-beating) gains the previous month.
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FeaturesBriefing: Private market fees
In today’s low-interest-rate and low-return environment, investing in private markets has become a requirement for virtually every institutional investor. Private markets are where investors can obtain the extra returns they need and can no longer earn from listed assets, thanks to the liquidity premium and higher risk/return profile of non-listed assets.
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FeaturesBriefing: Germany’s Spezialfonds are weathering the crisis well
Institutional investors in Germany continue to invest in funds despite the challenging conditions. In the middle of 2021, the volume of Spezialfonds – Germany’s vehicle for professional investors – on the Universal-Investment platform stood at almost €474bn. This represents an increase of 36% over the past 12 months. According to most observers, it has been one of the most exceptional periods in a long time.
