The following article by me was published in the Observer on 14 July 2002. Not that much has changed since, and my sentiment remains largely the same, which is why I have suggested dedicated government bonds to link savings to infrastructure this morning: The problems of the pensions ‘industry’ have been highlighted recently as falling
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I was discussing the political economy last night. This is not especially surprising: it is something I am inclined to do. It so happened that the conversation was with someone broadly of my own age. And rather unsurprisingly the election was debated. But our concern was with how this election still appears to be ignoring the
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The FT has reported today that: The Pension Protection Fund is in talks with Sir Philip Green and British Home Stores that could see the loss making department store chain offload responsibility for 20,000 pensioners on to the government-backed rescue agency. Officials are understood to have asked the retail billionaire who owned the store until
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This is from the Guardian this morning: More than 200,000 people have emptied their pension pot or withdrawn cash from it after the relaxation of rules on accessing retirement savings this year. The first comprehensive independent analysis shows that 204,581 people have taken advantage of the pension freedoms bought in by George Osborne on 6
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Yesterday’s stock market turmoil, whatever its long term impact, hints at a much bigger problem than a simple over valuation of Chinese shares needing adjustment. It is also a bigger issue than our failure to address the issues that 2008 made clear had to be addressed, important as that is. What it suggests, with its
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Four things have reminded me of a blog I wrote earlier this year in holding pension funds to account for the actions they take on behalf of their supposed members. The first has been the controversy on chief executive pay and what needs to be done about it. The second is my blog on People’s
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Yesterday the Centre for Policy Studies claimed that pensioner households that received more in income from the state than they p[aid in tax were a burden that justified further welfare reforms. That’s nonsense. But what the CPS ignored is that the cost of tax relief for private pensions is now a staggering £48 billion a
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As the Guardian has noted this morning: The UK’s fund management industry is “ripe for investigation” because of “an alarming lack of transparency that surrounds [its] pay and practices”, the influential Institute of Directors said on Sunday. Simon Walker, director general of the IoD, said “uninterested” financial regulators should wake up “to avoid another scandal
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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
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