I have been arguing for well over a decade that pension funds should be focussing their investment efforts on long term bonds issued by local authorities, government and related organisations who use the capital entrusted to them to invest in long term infrastructure such as housing, transport, hospitals, schools and so on. My logic has
Read the Rest…

The FT ran a story a day or so ago with the headline: PM accused of overlooking potential UK pension fund investment To give a taste it began: David Cameron is overlooking billions of potential investment held by British savers while asking foreign governments to put money into UK infrastructure , according to a major
Read the Rest…

I think I am fit enough to share press releases I like. This one is from the UK based Local Authority Pension Fund Forum, issued overnight. I think this shareholder activism a big step forward: London: In a global first, a group of institutional asset owners and managers are jointly calling for comprehensive transparency and
Read the Rest…

I was talking to a friend yesterday about fundamental economic reforms and the subject of pensions came into debate. That friend was concerned that in the event of fundamental economic reform pension contracts might fail. I explained that in my opinion that failure of pension contracts was inevitable in any case because, as I explained
Read the Rest…

One of the FT’s early morning emails includes this headline: Ebay is to spin off PayPal which accounts for as much as half of its $65bn stock market value, in a further unravelling of one of the few remaining successes from the dotcom era of internet companies. The story is here, but the detail does
Read the Rest…

I have already drawn attention this morning to an article in the FT and a new report that suggests that in the UK pension funds lost an average of 0.7% of funds invested on behalf of their members from 2000 to 2013. I thought I would have a quick look at how much this dismal
Read the Rest…

The FT ha an excellent article that anyone with an interest in pensions should read this morning. The argument is clear from the title, which is ‘Fees are a scourge on pension funds‘. The article makes three things clear. The first is that fees in most pension funds are much higher than for direct investing,
Read the Rest…

It is very hard to imagine how George Osborne could have delivered more injustice in one announcement than he did yesterday. What he announced was that anyone who had invested in a pension fund but who had not drawn down all that fund to pay a pension at the time of their death could now
Read the Rest…

I wrote on this blog last week about the £50 billion annual subsidy given to pensions each year. Some have argued the true figure is £38 billion but that is not true. We would recover tax on pensions paid out of past contributions whether or not we give current contributions. So £50 billion is definitely
Read the Rest…