The International Corporate Governance Council (ICGN) has appointed Carl Rosen, head of corporate governance at the Second Swedish National Pension Fund (AP2), as its new executive director replacing Anne Simpson who will join CalPERS as senior portfolio manager for corporate governance this month.
Australian Future Fund piles into debt
The $A51.2 billion ($37.9 billion) Australian Future Fund has quintupled its allocation to debt in the past year, significantly upweighting its exposure to debt securities in the last quarter to 21.9 per cent of the fund.
Governance review to facilitate speedy decisions at SWFs
Sovereign wealth funds are prioritising a review of their internal risk management frameworks and better communication with their stakeholders regarding expectations of financial markets, according to Patricia Pascuzzo, global head of national funds consulting at Mercer.
The corporate governance lessons from the financial crisis
This report from the OECD steering committee on corporate governance attributes a great deal of the financial crisis to failures and weaknesses in corporate governance arrangements.
Equity bias thwarts Irish sovereign fund’s returns
Ireland’s €15.5 billion (US$20.6 billion) sovereign wealth fund, the National Pensions Reserve Fund (NPRF), has been highly exposed to the equity market malaise. Kristen Paech examines the fund’s investment strategy and the Government’s recent decision to use the NPRF to finance the recapitalisation of two of Ireland’s
beleaguered banks.
The marginal investor: thoughts from the edge
What’s in a Name (or an Acronym)?
GFC is in the lexicon. It’s not in mine. I refuse to add to the surplus of investment TLAs in circulation. I refuse because naming induces a dangerously comforting sense that we’ve understood or even controlled that named. Hurricanes sound less malevolent, friendly almost, when called Kylie
or Jason. Once named our aches, pains and pathologies are noticeably softened and more readily accepted. We infer that someone, somewhere has identified, studied, and perhaps cured the pathology, an inference consistent with investment folklore that the greatest opportunities occur before an asset class
or strategy has been named. How re-assuringly benign and trustworthy are strategies pre-fixed by ‘enhanced’, ‘structured’, ‘protected’, and ‘balanced’? In Germany die Stratacticalstructuredquantamentalenhancedich
would surely induce a calming comfort and inspire trust.
