All IPE articles in September 2003 (Magazine)
View all stories from this issue.
-
Features
Westside story
Direct or indirect? Perhaps not as lofty a question as Hamlet’s “To be or not to be?” but decision makers at US pension plans, endowments and foundations face serious choices in making real estate allocations between indirect investment vehicles and traditional direct investments. A few members of the Pension Real ...
-
Features
Still stressed
The Danish pension fund market has been dominated in the past few years by the Danish Financial Supervisory Authority’s (DFSA) introduction of colour-coded stress tests to assess the financial strength of life insurers and pensions institutions. The DFSA’s so-called ‘traffic light’ system works on two scenarios: a ‘red light’ under ...
-
Features
Is this really on?
The months of July and August have long been known as ‘the silly season’ in newspaper circles. In keeping with this fine tradition comes the recent story in the Boston Globe newspaper that Citigroup is looking to purchase State Street – a story that, on the face of it, would ...
-
Features
On the rails
The emergence of infrastructure as an asset class has largely been driven by macroeconomic factors, explaining to some extent the varying stages of maturity in different countries. Traditionally governments have facilitated investment in infrastructure either by directly financing and building roads, railways, electricity grids and telephone lines, or by subsidising ...
-
Features
PIPE of peace
Few financing structures in recent memory have had the impact of private investments in public equity (PIPEs). Privately negotiated equity or equity-linked securities issued by public companies, PIPEs gained notoriety during the tech boom. Their standing soared and then crashed with the Nasdaq. But these structures have reclaimed some of ...
-
Features
A punt on paint
If you’re looking for an example of a sector pension funds should avoid, first impressions suggest fine art is hard to beat. Prices are difficult to predict, pieces can take ages to sell and trading costs and insurance are high. Annual dividends are non-existent, periods move in and out of ...
-
Features
Opportunity or trap?
Fears in the Netherlands that some of the early drafts of the pan-European Pensions Directive – particularly where it mentioned quantitative investment restrictions – could have impacted seriously on Europe’s second largest pension market were allayed by the final adopted version. This took great pains not to restrict any of ...
-
Features
New sense of realism
2003 was the year when pensions came out on to the streets. While it was by no means the first time in countries such as France that the state had been brought to a halt by public outcry over retirement reforms, other countries such as Austria – where thousands paraded ...
-
Features
Mainstream or not?
The poor performance of major equity markets in recent years and falling bond yields have encouraged greater focus on so-called ‘alternative assets’. Commercial property investment is often conveniently placed in this category, along with private equity and hedge funds. But is such a classification helpful or meaningful? The term ‘alternative’ ...
-
Features
JP Morgan makes 'master KAG' move
Global custodian JPMorgan Chase has gone into the ‘master KAG’ business in Germany. “Our aim is to strip out the administrative part of the JPMorgan Fleming KAG and decouple the asset management from this,” says Arnulf Manhold, business executive of the US bank’s investor services in Frankfurt. From the beginning ...
