Whether we are talking about the macro management of the economy or the micro management of people’s finances things are grinding to a halt. The long-maturity auction is being delayed a quarter, this hurts buy-ins, buy-outs , take-overs of pension liabilities in all kinds of ways. It makes it hard to set annuity rates – to put it simply “there is no market”.
Yesterday, Con Keating presented the current pension financial position as he has presented it on this blog. It is not a pleasant story and it has just got worse because we no-longer reliable partner in the United States
Keating’s argument is that DB cannot be a reliable driver of UK growth because the surpluses we are relying on from DB are unreliable.
He points to failures to address competition against others in the provision of artificial intelligence (AI) 
He shows that in the provision of data centres in the UK we are unable to make reliable estimates of costs – because we do not have the capacity to deliver in a reliably fast way. 
He argues that investing in climate change is a good policy for future generations of pensioners but not for the ones drawing their pensions now. He wonders why the future pensioners get no pensions as the current generation are the last to get private DB retirement income
He wonders why we rely on DB surpluses to boost our productive assets when they are intended for people who are unproductive. 
It is not a happy tale to have been told. We are not in a good position to advance ourselves against other countries who have better capacity to deliver artificial intelligence, process data and manage data centre costs. We have a long-term climate change strategy but it is not one that has fiduciary import to DB schemes (which will be over before their climate change strategies deliver). We are not working productively enough to fund pensions which can pay the bills to make Britain productive.
I am not sure I take all these arguments at face value, the data they are based on may be accurate but the past is not necessarily a guide to the future. But the future delivered to us by Trump is indeed sheer folly and the impact of this folly is deeply disruptive to business as usual for those in pensions.
In short, we are in no position to talk of pensions as delivering productive finance when we do not know how solvent they are (see the discrepancy in numbers between TPR/PPF and ONS). We cannot be sure of how we invest our DC savings as we have no plan for the second half of a pension’s life (the bit we spend our money). We are stifled in doing the nuts and boults of pension management.
How will deals get done / how will pensions be well run?
Disclosure, I hold shares in this chip provider
I would be interested in receiving enquiries for the next £5M funding round of a chip that uses light which reduces latency and can save 20% of electricity costs of a data centre. A British invention and something pension infrastructure might benefit from.
Additionally, I am looking to find a home for what might be described as a covered bond substantial counterparties. Return aprox. 5% plus RPI over the next 9.25 years Reason for sale holders over 75 wishing to rebalance due to the IHT proposals for 2026. Ticket size £10-12M
Mather.john@gmail.com
I would like to clarify a couple of points. I do not believe that the majority of surpluses would be invested productively if returned to sponsors – for all too many they would simply be spent as dividends to their shareholder owners.
I think that if DB scheme assets are to be invested productively, it needs to be the whole asset portfolio not just the rather arbitrary surplus amount – so no more LDI and certainly no leveraged LDI. Schemes do still hold material amounts of leveraged LDI, though the scale is lower than in 2022. In that episode, we saw the 20 year gilt peak at an intraday yield of 5.08%, it has recently traded as high as 5.52%
If mature closed schemes wish to invest productively they should be looking at investments which deliver within the remaining lifetime of the scheme, and that suggests that the j-curve effects of many start-ups and infrastructure developments would disqualify them.