All Opinion Pieces articles – Page 52
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Opinion Pieces
Making DC kings
Fidelity is still the king of the US retirement market, at number one among the defined contribution (DC) plans with over $940bn (€651bn) of assets in custody as record keeper at the end of 2010, 12% more than the year before. And there is not a traditional bank among the ...
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Opinion Pieces
Martijn Tans, Director, Aegon Global Pensions
“Most plans have actively addressed the issue of equity and interest rate risk. Those plans should now include longevity risk in their deliberations”
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Opinion Pieces
Battle to stave off crisis
Andrew Cuomo is one of the most admired recently-elected state governors – primarily for his efforts to get the budget under control and bring taxes down.
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Opinion Pieces
Defusing Short-Termism
The European Commission’s (EC) new green paper, ‘The EU Corporate Governance Framework’, clearly aims to encourage company owners to take a more active role in influencing management.
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Opinion Pieces
Meet Ms Active Ageing
Pension funds will observe with interest the European Commission’s announcement goal of the European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing. This is to add two years to the average EU healthy lifespan by 2020. However, achieving healthy, longer lives is not quite as straightforward as it seems.
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Opinion Pieces
Bernhard Wiesner - Senior vice president for corporate pensions, Bosch Group
“Europe is entering a period of time of both opportunities and risks that will place the second pillar on a knife’s edge”
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Opinion Pieces
State debate hots up
The debate about US public employees’ pension benefits is hotting up, and the results will have a great impact on the pension fund industry. For the first time there is a discussion about the real costs of promises made by politicians to public sector employees and the bill to tax payers. In fact, the whole matter is extremely political, as one can see from the very different approaches of two neighbouring states, Wisconsin and Illinois.
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Opinion Pieces
Peter Montagnon, Senior investment adviser, Financial Reporting Council
“The Stewardship Code does not require all its adherents to behave like activists”Peter Montagnon Senior investment adviser, Financial Reporting Council
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Opinion Pieces
MEPS rush green paper follow-up
Substantial indications of the direction Brussels is likely to take on pension policy are emerging surprisingly early as a follow-up to the Commission’s policy paper of last July.
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Opinion Pieces
Muni transparency
US lawmakers, investors and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are asking state and local administrations for more transparency about their pension liabilities. All are concerned that these liabilities are increasing the risk level of the $2.9trn (€2.1trn) of municipal bonds issued to balance local public budgets.
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Opinion Pieces
Language barriers
Pensions terminology is a confusing mishmash and needs to be simplified. It is causing problems not just for legislators but for all those who are pushing towards comparability in the finance and pensions industries.
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Opinion Pieces
Hard target
Are target-date funds (TDFs) serving the needs of their participants? To answer this question, JP Morgan Asset Management carried out research comparing participants’ behaviour with the common industry assumptions that inform TDF design. The conclusion is that the latter should be more conservative than experts might think.
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Opinion Pieces
Richard Jackson, Center for Strategic and International Studies
“Make large reductions in the generosity of state retirement provision to stave off fiscal Armageddon”
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Opinion Pieces
Deficits in focus
The EU has now made a significant concession to accommodate the demands made by eight CEE member states and Sweden in August last year for the incorporation of future pension funding shortfalls into national annual budget statistics. Their governments claimed current rules effectively punish them for having made reforms to their pension systems that involved channelling some contributions away from the state system and into private funds.
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Opinion Pieces
Svobodka Kostadinova and Nickolai Slavchev
For decades, countries in Europe and beyond have been rebounding between the two ideas of privatising social security and nationalising private pension schemes. Perhaps it is high time that the EU proposed a third way.
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Opinion Pieces
George Hoguet, State Street Global Advisors
As the industry ponders the medium-term implications of quantitative easing, sharp fiscal adjustment in Ireland, Greece and elsewhere, intervention by the Bank of Japan in the Japanese equity market, ‘currency wars’ and the future of the Obama presidency, they must confront a stark reality.
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Opinion Pieces
Public vote for change
The Republic victory at the November elections has huge implications for public pension funds. The results are, in fact, supportive of reform to retirement systems that are threatening to bankrupt several state and local administrations. A few newly elected governors advocate moving towards a hybrid pension model where at least ...
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Opinion Pieces
Toby Nangle, Director, Baring Asset Management
“Developing countries are positioned to enjoy a demographic dividend from now until 2030-35”
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Opinion Pieces
EIOPA: Mixed feelings
The new European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) opens its doors in 2011 with the prospect of greatly increased powers and a fivefold increase in staff in due course. EIOPA replaces the existing Committee of European Insurance and Occupational Pension (CEIOPS), which is one of the three ‘level three’ ...
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Opinion Pieces
A private equity rethink
At the end of a tumultuous decade, US public pension funds are re-evaluating their relationship with private equity firms. Disappointing returns, high fees and a number of scandals are pushing pension fund managers either to quit investing in this asset class or to take more control themselves. But no solution ...
