January 2023
11Jan

France unveils plan to raise retirement age by two years to 64

France's government has proposed raising the legal retirement age from 62 to 64 by 2030 in a major reform to the pension system. PM Elisabeth Borne said the changes were necessary to prevent a major deficit in the system in the future. Reforming pensions was one of President Emmanuel Macron's main promises when he was first elected in 2017. But the details immediately triggered an angry response from the unions, with plans for strikes on 19 January. Ms Borne's handling of an explosive...

January 11, 2023
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11Jan

CDC schemes would have ‘weathered’ market turmoil

Aon said market turbulence would not have had an adverse impact on members’ benefits A ‘well-designed’ collective defined contribution (CDC) scheme would have withstood recent market turmoil, according to Aon. In an update to the firm's Collective DC in adverse markets paper, originally published in October 2020, Aon said an efficient CDC scheme would have been able to resist the financial turbulence in the markets throughout 2021 and 2022, without having a negative impact on members' benefits or their retirement outcomes....

January 11, 2023
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11Jan

US. Investors’ resolve to forge ahead with ESG goals deepens for 2023

Russia's invasion of Ukraine and anti-ESG sentiment in the U.S. taught institutional investors to expect the unexpected in 2022, but those developments also deepened their resolve to forge ahead with sustainable investing goals — no matter what happens in the upcoming year. In 2023, institutions' ESG goals will include more specific expectations placed on companies to address climate risk, labor and human rights issues including diversity, and biodiversity, investors said. Many of them also plan to make a more direct...

January 11, 2023
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11Jan

Fintech Robos organises OECD pension event for MENA región

The experience and learning curve of Western and developed markets with defined contribution (DC) pension systems will be showcased one more time to the Arab world through another pension event organised by Fintech Robos, Bahrain-based savings & pensions technology provider. Fintech Robos and the OECD are partnering once again to launch “Pension Outlook 2022” Report in the MENA region. “Pensions Outlook” is one of two flagship bi-annual international pension reports and indexes produced by the Organisation of Economic Cooperation &...

January 11, 2023
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10Jan

Life expectancy in the U.S. has declined. What does that mean for your retirement?

Last month the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released its most recent U.S. life expectancy estimates, and sadly, the report found that, once again, Americans’ average number of years remaining have fallen. As reported recently, life expectancy at birth is now 76.4 years (as of 2021), down from 77 a year earlier. This is a drop of approximately 7 months over a one-year period, which takes life expectancy back almost a quarter-century to 1996. This decline is certainly...

January 10, 2023
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10Jan

UK. The key legal issues for pension schemes in 2023

After what proved to be an eventful year for schemes in 2022, top pension lawyers speak to Jasmine Urquhart about what they think will be some of the key legal and regulatory issues during the year ahead. Pensions dashboards At the top of the list for many lawyers consulted was the forthcoming introduction of pensions dashboards. As well as connecting to dashboards by their staging deadline, schemes must act on ‘find requests' and ‘view requests' relating to individuals, and provide members...

January 10, 2023
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10Jan

The Problem in An Aging Society is Income Distribution

The New York Times had a major article reporting on how many people in South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan are being forced to work well into their seventies because they lack sufficient income to retire. The piece presents this as a problem of aging societies, which will soon hit the United States and other rich countries with declining birth rates and limited immigration. While the plight of the older workers discussed in the article is a real problem, the...

January 10, 2023
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10Jan

The 30-year battle to reform France’s pension system

President Emmanuel Macron plans Tuesday to defy threats of mass protests in launching yet another bid to reform France’s debt-ridden pension system by forcing the French to work longer. In 2019, his attempt to replace dozens of separate regimes with a single points-based system and to push back the age for a full pension from 62 to 64 sparked the longest transport strike in decades. AFP looks back at the 30-year battle by various French governments of the left and right...

January 10, 2023
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09Jan

Bracing for the silver tsunami

Since 2011, sales of adult diapers in Japan have outpaced those for infants, reflecting a decline in the country’s fertility rate (live births per woman) from 3.66 in 1950 to around 1.5 by the early 1990s. Since then, Japanese fertility has remained stuck far below the “replacement rate” (2.1), amounting to a mere 1.3 in 2021. And geriatric Japan is not alone. Fertility rates have also dropped below the replacement level in all eurozone countries, and they are strikingly low...

January 9, 2023
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09Jan

How world’s biggest funds are preparing for a cash crunch

In a year of disease, war and inflation, one event struck fear into the heads of Australia’s super funds more than any other. That was October’s UK pension crisis which, had it not been for the intervention of the Bank of England, would have rendered many pension funds insolvent. While most Australian super funds would say they think deeply about ensuring they are never caught without enough emergency cash, that episode brought home just how quickly a liquidity crisis can evolve. The...

January 9, 2023
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