Opening up early access to super for housing would have a negative effect on the balances of even those members that don’t dig into their savings, with funds forced to adopt more conservative investment strategies and hold more liquid assets.
The circa $88 billion industry fund for workers in health and community services reckons that alleviating the affordable housing crisis will boost its other investments by easing the cost of living and inflation.
… as passive mandates expected to double by 2020
Passive investing is the fastest growing style of investing in the money management industry, according to London Stock Exchange Group, and is tipped to rise from 11 per cent of total funds in 2012 to 22 per cent in 2020.
At the LSE analyst briefing following the Russell takeover announcement on June 26, LSE chief financial officer, David Warren, said that the passive investment space was expected to grow at a compound rate of 18 per cent a year through to 2020 on a global basis.
A lot of this growth is from the retail sector, as ETFs continue their surge around the world. Most institutional investors, such as super funds, are probably close, on average, to the 22 per cent passive figure already.
In the institutional sector, any growth in passive investing is likely to come from the various “smart beta” strategies, which are being offered as an alternative to the traditional market-cap indices.
LSE, which owns the FTSE indices, is particularly strong in Europe and Asia and other emerging markets. It’s $4 trillion in assets benchmarked to its indices has a topline-growth profile of nearly 20 per cent compared with Russell’s 10 per cent.
This is largely because of the catch-up which occurred in European equity markets in the past few years and the stronger prospects for emerging markets, rather than mature markets like the US, generally.
