Con
You can download a video of Con in conversation with 30 of us last Tuesday here
Or you can watch the video directly here
Either way, you will not get a more eloquent exposition of the state of DB , wherever you look.
Con
You can download a video of Con in conversation with 30 of us last Tuesday here
Or you can watch the video directly here
Either way, you will not get a more eloquent exposition of the state of DB , wherever you look.
A very important contribution. Thanks.
I just want to comment on one thing that came up in a question from Peter. He asked why it was necessary to express discount rates in terms of gilts when gilt rates have very little to do with the valuation of liabilities of schemes whose investments are not in gilts.
This is a big issue for the USS, which uses this gilts plus approach for its valuation. It seems to cause some confusion because the fact that the return on government bonds is completely secure feeds to the fallacious belief among some that a gilt yield is therefore a risk-free rate. It is then hard to understand that the instability in the scheme can due to changing gilt yields. The large change from the scheme being in deficit by £14.1 billion in March 2020 to a surplus of this £7.4 billion in March 2023 cannot surely, therefore, be due to changes in discount rates, because the spread relative to gilts has not changed by very much, must be due to something else. The idea that the risk free gilt rate could change enough to cause this seems hard to accept.
And some stakeholder representatives believe that the regulator requires valuations always to be done using gilts-plus discount rates.
It would be good to have more open discussion of this issue. Maybe it could be a topic for a future pensions playpen coffee morning?