October 2018

18Oct

UK sitting on £20bn of unclaimed pension pots

Some 1.6 million lost pension pots worth nearly £20bn remain unclaimed, with people often losing track of their savings due to job changes or moving house, the Association of British Insurers (ABI) says, reffering to the figures as “jaw-dropping”. Research by the Pensions Policy Institute (PPI) on behalf of the ABI revealed 800,000 lost pensions worth an estimated £9.7bn. If scaled up to the whole market, it estimates there are collectively around 1.6 million pots worth £19.4bn unclaimed – the equivalent...

October 18, 2018
News, Slider,
Read more...
18Oct

AmCham Romania warns new pension law poses risk for budgetary and macroeconomic imbalance

The American Chamber of Commerce in Romania (AmCham), which represents 430 companies, expressed concern in a statement today regarding the significant increase of the social security expenses that the pension law draft, recently approved by the Romanian Government, levies on the general consolidated budget. “We believe that is mandatory for the presentation and consultations around this draft legislation with a major budgetary impact, to include information about the financing sources of the related increases, in accordance with the provisions of...

October 18, 2018
News, Slider, ,
Read more...
18Oct

Greece’s Civil Servants Call 24-Hour Strike Over Pay, Pensions

Greece’s largest public sector union will stage a 24-hour walkout on November 14 to demand wage and pension increases, hirings and tax cuts. “Now that we’ve become a normal country with a normal government which is no longer supervised by foreign powers, now is the time to try to solve some of the problems created in the past eight years,” ADEDY president Yannis Paidas told Reuters. “Public sector workers want their dignity back, we need to recoup some of our losses.” The...

October 18, 2018
News, Slider
Read more...
18Oct

Russian Pensions and the Risk of War

Putin raises the retirement age, inflaming the street. Will he find an external enemy to shore up support? In the streets of more than 80 Russian cities, thousands of men and women have turned out for antigovernment rallies in the past few months. They aren’t the usual malcontents—the middle class, intelligentsia or students—but rabotyagi, blue-collar working stiffs. Both the cause of the rallies and their political context reveal the impoverishment of Russia and the fragility of Vladimir Putin’s regime, despite...

October 18, 2018
News, Slider,
Read more...
17Oct

Romania to Double State Pensions by 2022

Government plans to boost pension spending to $35.2 billion in four years. In a move to eliminate discrepancies that have built up between various beneficiaries of the state pension system, Romania’s government has approved a plan to increase pension-related spending to 142 billion lei ($35.2 billion) by 2022, from approximately 62 billion lei this year. The plan is expected to more than double state pensions over the next four years for the country’s 5.2 million retirees, according to Reuters. Olguta Vasilescu, Romania’s...

October 17, 2018
News, Slider,
Read more...
17Oct

UK. FCA to require climate change disclosure for pension schemes

The FCA is consulting on rule changes requiring workplace personal pension scheme providers to disclose their ESG considerations, including climate change. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is consulting on rule changes requiring workplace personal pension scheme providers to disclose their environmental, social and governance () considerations, including climate change. In a discussion paper published this morning, the regulator said pension providers must increasingly recognise that 'climate change may reduce investment values and pension outcomes'. The FCA suggested this was particularly important for...

October 17, 2018
News, Slider,
Read more...
17Oct

Population aging, decrease not as detrimental as they seem: study

Environmental scientists argued on Tuesday that the fear for population aging and decrease was greater than their real dangers in an opinion article in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution. They cited multiple reports of the socioeconomic and environmental benefits of population aging, mortality-related decrease, and shrinking workforces due to retirement. Their evidences have revealed that, contrary to some economic analyses, costs associated with aging societies are manageable, while smaller populations make for more sustainable societies. The United Nations' population report...

October 17, 2018
News, Slider
Read more...
17Oct

US. Has Connecticut Found A Solution To Underfunded Public Pensions?

Public pensions are underfunded. Okay. I know, I know. We’ve all seen this headline before. Ad nauseum. To add to that, nothing seems to improve. Another year goes by and state employee pensions are still underfunded. The numbers don’t lie: at the close of 2016, the cumulative pension funding deficit stood at $1.4 trillion—the 15thannual increase in pension debt since 2000. It’s not like the states aren’t trying to make up the shortfalls. In fact, contributions to pensions from state...

October 17, 2018
News, Slider,
Read more...
17Oct

UK. Pension fund manager found guilty of stealing almost £1m

A pension fund manager at the UK’s Westminster City Council has been found guilty of stealing nearly £1m from an employee retirement scheme. Ian Woodall, 47, duped colleagues into approving successive payments by disguising them as investments. Over the three years from 2009, Woodall siphoned off £924,841 from the £1bn employee pension fund. Woodall then transferred the money to Swiss bank accounts and later moved it back into his British accounts, from where he used the money to refurbish his new...

October 17, 2018
News, Slider,
Read more...
16Oct

US. Workplace Retirement Coverage Drops And The System Continues To Fail

Despite an aging workforce who are worried about retirement and despite $140 billion annual tax breaks, and despite relatively light regulation, retirement plan coverage at work (including defined benefit and 401(k)-type coverage) has declined over the last two decades. Just 40 percent of workers were covered by a retirement plan through their workplace in 2017 , 4 percentage points lower than in 2014. And retirement plan coverage has fallen in 14 out of 17 years since 2000. The lack...

October 16, 2018
News, Slider,
Read more...