The 2017 Spring Meetings coincided with the surprise calling of snap general elections in the UK and military tensions in the Yellow Sea. Our postwar social contract has to cope with unprecedented shocks: Britain's thorny withdrawal from the EU, worsening Migrant Crisis, rise in populist...

This second of a series of seven papers co-authored by M. Nicolas J. Firzli and David Weeks looks at the notions of private markets – PE, VC, private debt and infrastructure – and the "quest for yields" in a low interest rates environment, which where discussed at two recent global...

This paper co-authored by M. Nicolas J. Firzli and David Weeks looks at the notions of long-term asset allocation and the ‘quest for yields’ from the perspective of AUS, European and North American pension investors and board members (trustees), which where discussed at two recent global...

The rapid rise of private asset markets has been one of the most remarkable phenomena in the institutional investment space since the start of the Great Recession (2008 – 2014). This trend is contributing to a pro-found transformation of the financial ecosystem as a whole. This unprecedented...

The nature of South–South international economic relations has changed significantly in recent decades, especially since the early 1990s. In areas such as trade, investment, labor markets, technology, and policy coordination, regional cooperation between countries of the South and pro-market...

Public pension funds are, by far, the world's preeminent asset owners, with more than $ 25 trillions in combined assets. The largest pension funds are found in the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, the Netherlands and the UK ("pension superpowers"). How they are managed, their funding...

French Abstract: Nicolas Firzli nous fait partager certains des travaux menés par le World Pensions Council (WPC) et résume ici une partie des interventions du G7 Pensions qui s'est tenu fin août dernier, en marge du Sommet du G7 de Biarritz. Il livre des pistes de réflexions précieuses...

The investment choices of large asset owners such as pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and endowments, are, to a large extent ‘guided’ and pre-determined by the systematic use of old- fashioned indices or benchmarks designed by a small set of Anglo- American ‘index providers’ –...

The co-authors of the article, are amongst the original coiners of term such as “infrastructure as an asset class” and “pension superpowers.” They also predicted, at the onset of the Covid Crisis, that a “historic realignment on the asset allocation front is happening precisely at the...

The authors of this article, Nicolas Firzli, WPC, David Weeks, AMNT, and the Hon. Nick Sherry, SEF, co-chaired the main financial roundtable during the COP21/Paris Agreement conference: the Paris Climate Finance Roundtable (CFR) , alongside Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, Director, Center for Sustainable...