Getting old is big business. In the UK, pension funds own £680bn worth of assets and 46% of the shares quoted on the London Stock Exchange. But while asset management companies are targeting pensions as a major growth area, the Government is bailing out, scared off by the financial burden of caring for the increasingly aged population.
The pension industry has been buffeted about by some big winds in recent times. Volatile equity markets saw pension funds lose almost 10% of their value in 2001, Financial Reporting Standard 17 (FRS17) made tougher accounting standards explicit and the Merrill Lynch/ Unilever case showed that termination was not the only way to deal with an underperforming fund manager.
