Pension Pulse

Rian Howlett , Laura Bratton and Ines Ferré of Yahoo Finance report  Dow, S&P 500, Nasdaq surge to records as tame inflation cements Fed rate cut bets: US stocks surged to record highs on Friday as investors digested a crucial inflation report that helped cement expectations for the Federal Reserve’s next policy moves. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 1%, or over 450 points. The S&P 500 gained 0.8%, while the Nasdaq Composite jumped 1.2%. The September inflation data released on Friday morning came in cooler than expected . The headline Consumer Price Index rose 3% on an annual basis, the highest level since May but softer than forecasts for a 3.1% gain. Month-over-month, prices rose 0.3%, a slight cooling from August's reading and also below expectations. The report was delayed by more than a week due to the ongoing government shutdown, and was the first major economic release since the closure began, giving investors a long-awaited ...

Earlier today, Prime Minister Carney announced a major new investment to power Canada’s clean-energy future:  In a rapidly changing and uncertain world, Canada’s new government is focused on what we can control. We are protecting our communities and our country. We are building our economy with major projects and millions more homes. We are empowering Canadians with lower costs and new opportunities to help you get ahead. We cannot control what other nations do, but we can control what we choose to build – and we are building Canada strong. Canada’s new government is moving decisively to build major nation-building projects that create high-paying careers, reduce emissions, and grow our economy. To that end, the government launched the  Major Projects Office to cut red tape and fast-track major nation-building projects. Last month, the Prime Minister, Mark Carney, announced the  first wave of projects referred to the Major Projects Office for...

Sai Devabhaktuni, Senior Managing Director, recently joined other Private Equity Leaders for a discussion on Portfolio Construction at the 2025 Mergermarket Private Equity Forum.  The private equity playbook is being rewritten and reshaping how investors operate. Longer holding periods, slower exit activity, and changing GP behaviours are driving institutional allocators to rethink traditional approaches. At the recent Mergermarket Private Equity Forum in Austin, industry leaders gathered to discuss how they are evolving portfolio construction in today’s environment.     Navigating the slower flywheel   Sai Devabhaktuni, Senior Managing Director at BCI Private Equity , shared how BCI is navigating these market challenges. “The investment – value creation – monetization flywheel is not spinning as fast as it should be.” Put simply, private equity firms are taking longer to exit investments and return capital while simultaneously approaching investor...

Ilya Gridneff and Mary McDougall of the Financial Times report Canada tells pension funds to invest at home in age of ‘economic nationalism’: Canada is calling on its C$3tn (US$2.1tn) pension system to boost domestic investment as it seeks C$500bn in new finance to reboot the economy and lower its dependence on the US. Industry minister Mélanie Joly told the Financial Times the new wave of “economic nationalism” means Canada’s financial institutions must foster homegrown investments and major infrastructure projects to kick-start the country’s sluggish economy. “I’ve had lots of conversations with our banks, and our pension funds. There’s a sentiment that we need to think about Canada first and that we need to put capital where our mouth is,” she said. This month Joly launched an industrial strategy aimed at creating jobs and attracting foreign investment in response to US President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canada. “For a long time pension funds have said that they need to...

Susanna Rust of IPE reports pension fund execs tackle ‘disconnect’ as governments target institutional capital: A group of senior-level executives from major pension funds across the world have developed a guide to help governments understand how they can successfully attract domestic institutional capital to help achieve their policy goals.  The guide is the output of a working group of the International Centre for Pension Management (ICPM), a global network of more than 50 pension funds and related organisations that together manage more than $8trn (€6.9trn) of assets . Sebastien Betermier (featured above), ICPM executive director and a lead author of the new paper alongside Onno Steenbeek, from APG Asset Management, told IPE: “We launched this working group because there is a real disconnect between what governments expect from private capital and what institutional investors expect from their investments. “This report develops a comprehensive and practical framework – the ‘i...

Ken Sweet of the Associated Press reports regional banks' bad loans spark concerns on Wall Street: Wall Street is concerned about the health of the nation’s regional banks, after a few of them wrote off bad loans to commercial customers in the last two weeks and caused investors to wonder if there might be more bad news to come. Zions Bank, Western Alliance Bank and the investment bank Jefferies surprised investors by disclosing various bad investments on their books, sending their stocks falling sharply this week. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon added to the unease when he warned there might be more problems to come for banks with potentially bad loans. “When you see one cockroach, there are probably more,” Dimon told investors and reporters on Tuesday, when JPMorgan reported its results. The KBW Bank Index, a basket of banks tracked by investors, is down 7% this month. There were other signs of distress. Data from the Federal Reserve shows that banks tapped the c...