Amundi

A hurricane doesn’t cause a financial crisis, and a financial crisis doesn’t cause a hurricane – so investors are increasingly eyeing the lucrative and uncorrelated returns of the cat bond market.

Last year’s savage selloff hit ESG strategies hardest, but it hasn’t hit the appetite from big institutions. Their tastes have just become more discerning, with more stringent criteria for external manager selection.

Markets could be asked to absorb a lot more debt as central banks lighten their balance sheets. But as governments continue to issue it, nobody knows whether unwinding can be done in an orderly manner.

While hopes of a ‘soft landing’ abound, global pension funds are a little more cynical. A stagflationary environment is not just possible, but likely, and hedging against it will be a herculean task.

Tomorrow is starting to look a lot like yesterday, with policymakers leveraging lessons from post-war Europe to solve the new problems barrelling towards us. Free market thinkers will likely chafe. “Financial repression” is the institutional constraints on interest rates designed to reduce the government’s cost of funding and shrink public debt. The term, coined in…

While the weight of global retail investment flows has swung behind climate-related themes in the past two years, that is not the case in all countries. Take a large developing nation such as South Africa for example. Ninety One, the listed global fund manager with a range of asset strategies and a long pedigree in…

In the past 10 months, since November last year, the investor’s decision on China has done a fully circle – from not whether to invest but how to invest, back to not how but whether. It was in November that the Chinese Government scuttled the US$37 billion IPO of Ant Group, the financial services affiliate…

Adopting a robo-advice platform will increase member contributions as well as investment-option performance, while improving diversification, according to a study of French savings plans. While the buzz surrounding its introduction just over 10 years ago has abated, an increasing body of research is building on the value of robo-advice. More than a marketing tool for…

What we have learned from the Covid-19 crisis