FUND managers have been some of the biggest beneficiaries of the financial sector’s growth over the past 30 years. Bankers may routinely earn million-pound bonuses but some hedge-fund and private-equity managers have become billionaires. Seldom has so much been earned by so few.
These riches have been generated despite the ability of investors to take advantage of low-cost exchange-traded funds and index-trackers. Investors have surged off-piste in search of higher returns. In aggregate, however, they will merely end up paying higher fees (typically, a 2% annual fee plus 20% on performance), a phenomenon this column has described as “catch two-and-twenty”. ...
In the first in a series of profiles of financial institutions after the crisis we look at PIMCO, a giant fund manager
BILL GROSS has a dual passion for philately and philanthropy. In 2007 he gave to Doctors Without Borders the $9.1m he earned from an auction of his collection of British stamps. He has said he is happy to part with “old friends” for a good cause. But the 66-year-old shows no sign of parting ways with the company he co-founded in 1971, Pacific Investment Management Co (PIMCO), one of the world’s largest bond-fund managers and, since 2000, a unit of Allianz, a German insurer. As co-chief investment officer, he manages PIMCO Total Return, the world’s largest mutual fund with $234 billion of assets. It is as successful as it is big, returning an average 7.5% over the past five years—better than 98% of its peers, according to Bloomberg.
PIMCO itself, however, is changing. Having long marketed itself as “the global...
A useful new way to capture the many aspects of poverty
WHAT IS poverty and when is a person poor? Most would agree that poverty involves not having enough of certain things, or doing without others that richer people take for granted. But what is “enough”, which goods and services really matter, and who should decide these questions—researchers, governments or international agencies—are less tractable issues. Perhaps the poor themselves should have the final word. But this presents its own problems. Tabitha, a 44-year-old woman from a slum outside Nairobi, told researchers from Oxford University that going without meals was “normal for us”. Diminished expectations are only one of the effects of dire poverty.
In the world of international development, most have rallied around the “dollar-a-day” poverty line (or more precisely, the $1.25-a-day measure) and its less acute cousin, $2-a-day poverty. These World Bank measures...
THE loans that microfinance companies make may be tiny but their ambitions can be vaulting. Take SKS Microfinance. Already India’s biggest microlender, with 6.8m clients and 5.8m active borrowers in the year ending on March 31st (see chart), it intends to become the world’s largest by 2012, with 15m clients. To fund this growth, it hopes to raise nearly $350m by selling a 21.6% stake in an initial public offering (IPO) which got under way this week.
According to the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), a think-tank housed at the World Bank, the IPO is only the second by a pure microfinance institution, after the offer by Mexico’s Compartamos Bank in 2007. More may follow. CGAP reckons that SKS’s move “should set the stage for future IPOs in the sector.” The omens are good. On July 27th SKS announced that it had raised $64m from anchor investors, including JPMorgan Chase,...
Correction: Burger-lovers in Argentina were enjoying a special discount on Big Macs when we collected data for our index (July 24th 2010). At nornal prices the peso is undervalued by 5% not 52%. Sorry for the whopper. This has been corrected online.
