October 2019

08Oct

US. GE is freezing its pension plan for 20,000 US workers

General Electric announced Monday it will freeze its US pension plan for about 20,000 workers to help clean up the company's beleaguered balance sheet.Years of inattention, low interest rates and shrinking profits have left GE with one of the largest pension shortfalls in Corporate America.GE (GE) said it will pre-fund $4 billion to $5 billion of its pension obligations for 2021 and 2022 and offer lump-sum payouts to 100,000 former employees who have not started their monthly payments yet. GE is also...

October 8, 2019
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September 2019

27Sep

Pensions and Early Retirement: The Case of The Public Servants in Uganda

By Kibs Boaz Muhanguzi Retirement, if influenced by pensions, can be a good manifestation of how the government can use the pension system as a fiscal instrument to achieve some socioeconomic targets. Borrowing intuition from the postulations of disengagement theory of aging that when the elderly retire, they free up positions in paid work for the entry of young individuals, this study investigates the role of incentives on early retirement. The high levels of unemployment in Uganda amidst the...

September 27, 2019
Articles, Pension design, System Sustainability, , , ,
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25Sep

The Shift from Defined Benefits to Defined Contributions

We’ve been talking about asset management—which we’ve classified as the management of corporate and institutional investments—and how its very structure has been changing, largely due to innovative and disruptive technology. The first article on this topic circumscribed the rise of asset management in the latter half of the last century and how it enjoyed a 40-year window of unparalleled growth, disrupted finally by economic upheaval and the upsurge in consumer demand, technology, and especially data. How the free flow...

September 25, 2019
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23Sep

UK. Universities: we fight for security and pensions

Philip Inman gave a misleading account of the University and College Union’s campaigns to defend university pensions and fight for job security and a manageable workload (“Academics are fighting the wrong battle over pensions”, Business). It is not correct to suggest that we are focusing on the fight to save our pension scheme at the expense of seeking better working conditions and more secure contracts for university staff, especially junior staff. In fact, UCU and its predecessor unions have...

September 23, 2019
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10Sep

US. Corporate Pension Funding Moves Closer to Worrisome 80% Level

U.S. corporate pensions felt the pain of low bond yields in August. The retirement funds for U.S. corporations had just 82% of the money they expect to need over time for pensioners as of August, down four percentage points from July, according to a statement from consulting firm Mercer on Monday. The steep drop stemmed from long-term bond yields plunging to record lows, which effectively increases the current value of companies’ future obligations. Declines in U.S. equities didn’t help...

September 10, 2019
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04Sep

Ecuadorian Retirees demand Payment of their Pensions

Dozens of retirees from the National Electricity Corporation (CNEL) today demanded that President Lenin Moreno's government pay their pensions through the Ecuadorian Social Security Institute (IESS). New demonstrators joined the pensioner's hunger strike in Rocafuerte Square, in the center of Guayaquil, about 267 kilometers from the capital, who are claiming that they have received incomplete pension payments for the past decade. In the opinion of several strikers, the IESS calculated the retirement pension based on the unified basic salary...

September 4, 2019
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August 2019
30Aug

The Palgrave Handbook of Unconventional Risk Transfer

By Maurizio Pompella, Nicos A Scordis This handbook examines the latest techniques and strategies that are used to unlock the risk transfer capacity of global financial and capital markets. Taking the financial crisis and global recession into account, it frames and contextualises non-traditional risk transfer tools created over the last 20 years. Featuring contributions from distinguished academics and professionals from around the world, this book covers in detail issues in securitization, financial risk management and innovation, structured finance...

August 30, 2019
Books, Investing, System Sustainability, ,
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March 2019

17Mar

Defined Contribution Pension Plans: Who Has Seen the Risk?

By Peter Forsyth (University of Waterloo - David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science) & Kenneth R. Vetzal (University of Waterloo) The trend towards eliminating defined benefit (DB) pension plans in favor of defined contribution (DC) plans implies that increasing numbers of pension plan participants will bear the risk that final realized portfolio values may be insufficient to fund desired retirement cash flows. We compare the outcomes of various asset allocation strategies for a typical DC plan investor. The strategies...

March 17, 2019
Articles, Pension design, , ,
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August 2018

06Aug

Stealing To The Youth And Giving To The Old? : Intergenerational Inequalities And Political Dynamics In The Italian Pension System

By Giulio Del Balzo "The contemporary welfare state in capitalist democracies is largely a welfare state for the elderly” (Myles, 1984) Filicide is a recurrent event in ancient mythology, as well as in nature. Just as Kronos devoured his sons, fearing that they would dispossess him from the Gods’ throne, so many animal species, like lions, usually kill their puppies, since they perceive their children as potential threats to their consolidated interests and well-being. So, as in nature and myths, filicide...

August 6, 2018
Aging, Books, Labor Market, ,
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06Aug

A Risk Too Far The Case Against Collective Defined Contribution Pensions

By Michael Johnson Royal Mail has committed to offering its workers a Collective Defined Contribution (CDC) pension scheme, designed to split the difference between existing Defined Contribution and Defined Benefit schemes. The CDC idea is winning increasing support. But it is risky, untested and undermines the personal pensions freedoms introduced in 2015 The system risks creating irreversible intergenerational injustice by overpaying pensioners at the expense of current and future employees. It is also unclear whether what is promised to workers is actually deliverable. Where...

August 6, 2018
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