Leo Kolivakis's blog

Dan Bigman of Forbes wants to remind you Wisconsin’s Public Pension Problems Are Your Problem, Too. But are they really or is this more fear mongering?

The last time the oil price lost touch with gravity, which it threatens to again with the price of Brent crude now well north of $100 a barrel, it helped tip the world economy into the deepest recession since the 1930s. Is history about to repeat itself?

Will the bond market kill the party in stocks? It's not that simple...

Oops...a staggering £80billion has been wiped off the value of UK pensions because the rate of inflation has been underestimated for 12 years...

A recent proposal by a group of Quebec-based advocates to create a shareholder insurance fund for victims of financial fraud could put the province on a collision course with Canada's big banks...

According to Mercer, climate change will end up costing pensions trillions...

Some people just don't know when to keep their mouth shut...

President Obama's budget proposes to raise premiums the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. charges employers by $16 billion over ten years and, in a significant policy shift, would levy higher premiums on the riskiest companies...

Nearly three-quarters of UK defined benefit pension schemes aim to de-risk their funds, according to a survey of 200 schemes, carried out by Aon Hewitt.

Pension system investment directors overseeing more than $217 billion in California and New Jersey cut millions of dollars in projected costs by reducing the fees they pay to asset managers...

The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, which manages surplus contributions for the Canada Pension Plan, said Thursday its total assets were valued at a record $140.1 billion at Dec. 31, the end of the third quarter of fiscal 2011. And it's going on a shopping spree, buying global infrastructure and US commercial real estate...

States in peril are cutting to the bone and lawmakers around the US are looking at new ways to prevent budget disasters by changing the rules for overburdened state employee pension funds...

The largest US public pension fund accused Lehman Bros. Holdings Inc., its former top executives and numerous bond underwriters of fraud and making materially false statements about losses from mortgage-backed securities during the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008...

Global institutional pension fund assets in the 13 major markets increased by 12% during 2010 to reach a new high of US$ 26 trillion according to Towers Watson’s Global Pension Assets Study. Despite the impressive rise in assets, the global asset/liability ratio is still well down from its 1998 level, highlighting the fact that global pensions remain vulnerable...

My fear is that another stock bubble is underway and despite lessons from the past, it will last a lot longer than we think...