The €140-billion ($191-billion) Dutch pension fund PFZW is in the midst of completely rethinking its investment philosophy, Jaap van Dam, managing director of PGGM, told the Fiduciary Investors Symposium in Amsterdam. PGGM manages the investments of PFZW and has traditionally guided them. Van Dam explains that ownership of the investment strategy is to shift decidedly
Roger Urwin, global head of content at Towers Watson and governance specialist, says most organisations don’t spend enough time on it, but transformational change is all about giving time to investment governance. Culture and leadership, for example is so self-evidently important in people organisations and yet it is understated in asset owners, he says. “The soft
Oregon State Treasury, which runs $80 billion worth of state investments including the $62-billion Oregon Public Employees Retirement Fund, is preparing the portfolio for a new dawn. John Skjervem, chief investment officer of the treasury’s investment division, sees the speed and extent of the recent sell-off in fixed income as “a shot across the bow”
Attempts to apply a formula to asset allocation based on an asset’s historical volatility and relationship with other assets tend to fail when presented with black-swan events. Equities tend to rise along with commodities except when presented with political events such as the price hikes in oil in 1973 that sent equities into free fall.
There continues to be potential for pension capital appearing where bank lending no longer wants to go. Commentators in the UK and continental Europe have heightened expectations that pension funds will step in to help fill the continent’s bank financing gap. Societe Generale, for instance, recently predicted further “disintermediation” by investors sidestepping banks and looking
This paper from Matt Dobra and Bruce Lubich, of the Methodist University in North Carolina and the University of Maryland University College, respectively, analyses the relationship between governance, asset allocation, and risk among state and local government-operated pension systems in the United States of America. It is argued that governance influences investment decisions and risk profiles of public
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FIS Amsterdam 2013