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End of the beginning for responsible investment

Recent reflections on this month’s five-year anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse have focused on a variety of developments since the crisis: from reform to remuneration, sovereign debt to shadow banking, and from offshore tax to the Occupy movement. However, one significant area that has been largely overlooked has been the rise of sustainable and

Precarious world needs effective G20

General secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, Sharan Burrow, spoke to the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney, Australia on Thursday August 1 about the need for an effective G20 in a precarious world. Ladies and Gentlemen, The global economy is no more stable today than it was six years ago, and the

Towards sustainable stock exchanges

Wall Street is not normally synonymous with sustainability. But today, the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will ring the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange to welcome NYSE Euronext into the Sustainable Stock Exchanges Initiative, joining NASDAQ OMX and leading emerging market exchanges from Turkey, South Africa, Egypt, Brazil and India. Why would

Asset-backed funding: desperate or innovative?

On one hand, the decision by one of the United Kingdom’s leading foods businesses, Dairy Crest, to plug its £84-million ($130-million) pension deficit with cheese smacks of desperation. Any proactive investment strategy to get the $1.2-billion pension fund back on track has been abandoned for a funding measure using unconventional sponsor assets to plug investment

Gloom at NAPF attests to investor adventure

One year on and the job of trustees gathered at the United Kingdom’s National Association of Pension Funds, NAPF, annual investment conference in Edinburgh hasn’t got any easier. As the search for optimism in a low-return world endures, the conference seems to be caught in a time loop. Compared to last year, deciding on the

The smoking gun at CalSTRS

For a pension fund that describes itself as “ponderous”, the $154-billion California State Teachers’ Retirement System, CalSTRS, has moved uncharacteristically swiftly in recent months. The second largest public pension fund in the United States, the plan for teachers and faculty is in the process of divesting its holdings in gun manufacturers following the massacre at