Latest analysis – Page 14
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Opinion Pieces‘Close contact’ needed amid pandemic
Multiple lockdown restrictions have brought about a simpler way of working for some – remotely from home for most – but for institutional investors it also meant coming up with strategic models that could maintain the quality of asset managers’ due diligence – existing or potential.
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FeaturesPerspective: Targeting net zero
Ambitious ‘net-zero’ carbon reduction goals are the latest in the evolution of asset owners’ engagement with climate change
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FeaturesThe pandemic end-game
Overcoming COVID-19 and ensuring no recurrence is proving to be a formidable challenge for the global economy. The worst may still lie ahead. Even health systems in developed markets are creaking at the seams with the second and third waves of the pandemic. More transmissible mutations of the virus are making the task even harder.
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Features
Accounting Matters: Auditing the auditors
There is widespread consensus that the audit sector is not fulfilling its potential, and that previous attempts at reform have been ineffective. As the impact of high quality audit goes far beyond the boardroom, when pension funds rely on audited financial statements for their capital allocation decisions, it is ultimately their individual members’ capital that is at risk.
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FeaturesLong-term matters: Stop investing in autocracy
Europeans observing the US ‘near miss’ constitutional crisis have a choice – be spectators or show responsibility
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FeaturesBiodiversity can be measured
Last year was clearly the year of the pandemic. Perhaps the connection between zoonotic disease and biodiversity loss may explain why it has also been the year that biodiversity has become a theme of great interest for investors. Yet current environmental, social and governance (ESG) data and metrics do not cover biodiversity adequately.
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FeaturesPerspective: Litigation - state of pay?
Changes in legislation like the UK’s Consumer Rights Act 2015 have led to an increase of class actions led by pension funds as they seek to recover investment losses
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FeaturesResearch: The shift from virtue to value
In the final article in a series of two, Pascal Blanqué and Amin Rajan argue that the success of ESG investing rests on a just transition to a low carbon future
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FeaturesIs sustainability mispriced?
Living in the developed world over the past 50 years, life has been stable, even idyllic, for most people. That is certainly compared with their grandparents and previous generations who lived through two world wars and the Spanish flu. But, as COVID-19 has shown so cruelly, there are existential dangers that can lie hidden. These can rip the established world order asunder if not tackled beforehand.
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FeaturesAccounting Matters: Accounting for the Wedge
The reason why defined benefit (DB) scheme sponsors account for inflation is because International Accounting Standard 19, Employee Benefits, tells them that if they make a benefit promise that is linked to price increases, the effect of that commitment has to be accounted for. The starting point for what by any standards is a gargantuan actuarial task is to look at yields on inflation-linked bonds.
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FeaturesPerspective: Markowitz is still modern
Thirty years after he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, Harry Markowitz’s groundbreaking work from the 1950s still powers financial innovation
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FeaturesResearch: Resilience is the new watchword
In the first of two articles, Pascal Blanqué and Amin Rajan ask whether the current volatility in asset prices is a buying opportunity or the halfway stage in a prolonged bear market?
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FeaturesBiden signal is green for ESG
For many, US president-elect Joe Biden spells hope. From an ESG-perspective, there are two main aspects to this phenomenon.
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FeaturesSmart phones: the key to African opportunity
Demographics are often the least appreciated of the long-term trends that investors consider, despite being perhaps the most important.
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FeaturesAccounting Matters: Who sets the standards?
You are what you know, the saying goes. And it goes without saying that the 211 comment letters the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) received on its Primary Financial Statements (PFS) project will represent some diverse viewpoints.
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FeaturesPerspective: Manager selection in a pandemic
The social distancing restrictions imposed to contain COVID-19 have made external asset manager selection more demanding, but investors are adapting
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AnalysisUK DB: Pushback over UK proposals for ‘one size fits all’ funding code
Not long before the UK went into its COVID-19 lockdown this March, The Pensions Regulator (TPR) launched the first of a two-stage consultation on a revised defined benefit (DB) funding code.
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FeaturesAccounting Matters - UK DB pension schemes: One step forward, two steps back
As sometimes happens with Easter, one of the surveys of the UK pensions accounting landscape from consultants Lane Clark & Peacock (LCP) was later than usual. And, like an Easter egg, this keenly awaited overview of the net funding position of FTSE 100 defined benefit (DB) pension schemes comes in two halves.
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FeaturesPerspective: What is trusteeship worth?
Running a pension fund is a difficult job, whether for an executive, a professional trustee, or a member-nominated representative
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Analysis
Research: Stewardship – a key point of competition
In the second of two articles on a new survey, Amin Rajan and Simon Klein argue that climate-change investing is mandating asset managers to be agents of change
