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Infrastructure

Learning from Danish funds’ stable alternative

Despite upturns in equity and bond prices sending 2012 returns into double digits at many large Danish funds, it appears that successfully implementing infrastructure initiatives remains the holy grail of Danish institutional investing. Instead of merely basking in 12.9-per-cent annual returns, Industriens Pension, for instance, used its 2012 results announcement to make a commitment to […]
Uncategorised posts

Europe’s credit rating crunch

It has been a bad month for credit-rating agency executives who thought they were winning the legal and regulatory arguments about how they conduct their business. In Australia, the Federal Court ruled on November 5 in favour of 12 local councils in New South Wales which claimed that Standard and Poor’s had misled them into […]
Research

EDHEC puts CDS under the spotlight

In recently released research, Dominic O’Kane, affiliated professor of finance at EDHEC Business School, challenges the assumptions about the operation of the eurozone sovereign-linked credit default swaps (CDS) market. The European Parliament decided to permanently ban so-called “naked” CDS in October 2011 on the back of claims that their speculative use caused or accelerated the […]
Uncategorised posts

Forget sovereign debt as a safe haven: Mercer

The status of sovereign debt as a safe-haven investment has been put into question and the whole approach to bond investing may need to be revisited, according to Mercer, which has urged institutional investors to focus in the coming year on the ‘new realities’ of the global marketplace, which includes sufficient flexibility in their portfolios.