Investment Officer Luxembourg

The EU’s ESG investment taxonomies are evolving. Only certain aspects of climate action are currently taken into account, but work is on-going so that the environmental taxonomy covers more areas and will be applied in a subtler fashion.

After almost half a century at the helm of KKR, co-CEOs Henry Kravis and George Roberts are handing over the baton to their successors. Kravis and Roberts are first cousins and, together with Jerome Kohlberg, they founded Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Co (KKR for short) in 1975.

As governments and central banks wind down their support programmes, more corporate defaults and restructurings will follow. For distressed debt investors, a particularly attractive return of 15 per cent per annum is in store.

It is too early to talk about stagflation, but inflation risks are rising and therefore central banks need to be very vigilant about tightening monetary policy early if prices rise and global growth slows. 

While the price of gas shot through the roof last week, it seems that a real energy crisis can be avoided in the short term now that Vladimir Putin is going to supply extra gas. Nevertheless, the unexpected turbulence in the energy market is reason for ING to reassess its investment strategies. It is a perfect storm.

The question is whether the illiquidity of private markets is still an issue if the market becomes more volatile again. Especially when you realise that liquid markets can also become illiquid.

The asset allocation of an insurer is different from that of a traditional asset manager or private bank. On the one hand, there are the provisions imposed by the regulator and, on the other, the long-term obligations. Low yields on government bonds are also a challenge for AG Insurance, explained Olivier Colsoul (pictured), Senior Strategist at AG Insurance. This is countered by strategically increasing the equity weighting and adding alternative asset classes, he explained.

There is a risky and dangerous novelty in the financial markets: “the prices of stocks, bonds and real estate, the three most important asset classes in the United States, are all extremely high”. 

That is the warning from Robert Shiller, the 2013 Nobel Prize-winning economist and scientist, in an opinion piece in the New York Times. “Never have the three been so overvalued at the same time in modern history.”

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ING has aligned its asset allocation for the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg as of October, as the next step in the centralisation of its investment policy. In the meantime, the private bank has reorganised its customer service in order to create order in a “jungle of service concepts”.