Nearly every Australian has super, but its settings don’t work for every Australian, according to the First Nations Foundation, which is advocating for changes around estate planning and the preservation age to make the system fairer.
Betting against acts of God is a great way to make money, but institutional allocations to natural catastrophe reinsurance have stayed relatively static even as some managers are generating double-digit uncorrelated returns.
CIFR to fund independent research on FSI proposals
The Centre for International Finance and Regulation is to fund individual research based on any of the 44 proposals presented last week in the final report of the Financial System Inquiry. The organisation has called for applications by February 13 – ahead of the March deadline for industry responses to the inquiry.
CIFR said academics from “consortium member universities”, with relevant expertise and experience, are invited to submit research proposals addressing any one or more of the 44 recommendations made by the Financial System Inquiry. The project timeframe for completion is June 30, 2015.
Research proposals submitted will be reviewed by the Board Research Committee which will also make the funding decisions. The review will focus on:
> Relevance to the recommendations identified in the FSI report;
> Likelihood that the research will provide valuable new insights;
> Quality of research leader/team;
> Soundness of research methodology;
> Value for money; and timeframe (three-month period only).
Consortium member universities are: University of NSW, Maquarie University, University of Sydney, UTS, Australian National University and University of Melbourne.
CIFR said over the course of 2014, the organisation invested a significant amount of time, resources and research focus on the FSI. This involved contributing formal submissions, coordinating researchers to directly engage with the FSI secretariat, and developing text analytics for the interim FSI report.
CIFR also hosted two high-profile conferences, bringing together industry, regulators, academe and the FSI Secretariat – one in May and the other in August 2014.
