Germany’s €70 billion pension provider VBL is increasing its diversification, notably investing in overseas real estate outside Germany for the first time. It's also increasing its tilt to international equities over European stocks, enabled by an organisational and investment process overhaul.
This research by academics at Duke and Columbia Universities looks at whether it still makes sense to separate equities allocations into developed and emerging market buckets. Given the dramatic globalization over the past twenty years, does it make sense to segregate global equities into “developed” and “emerging” market buckets? This paper argues that the
How should pension funds in the United Kingdom best prepare for the government unwinding quantitive easing (QE) and tightening monetary policy? The Bank of England isn’t showing any signs of ending QE just yet, its policy begun in 2009 and designed to stimulate the economy by creating new money to buy government bonds. But QE
For many institutional investors, surviving the financial crisis in good shape has been the challenge of a lifetime. Few have had to deal with an asset seizure from Napoleon and two world wars being fought on its soil. It is a history that Italy’s Compagnia di San Paolo is proud of, yet in its asset
The emerging market story is a puzzle with many pieces. From an overall philosophical standpoint, the demographic and economic shifts are obvious reasons to have a weighting to emerging markets. But the complexity comes into play with the question of how to invest. Investors can consider private equity, property and other direct investments as a
Real estate is back in fashion, at least according to a range of recent surveys indicating the growing institutional investor appetite for bricks and mortar. After a tough few years for the industry and with European investors’ priorities changing, the possible renaissance might come with a marked change in investing patterns, though. More control The
Pension funds and social housing: it looks like a perfect match as schemes in the United Kingdom seek long-term, index-linked cash flows and housing associations, the not-for-profit providers of this type of affordable housing for low income households, hunt the long-term finance they can’t access via banks. Broad residential housing represents just 1 per cent
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