New private credit analysis tool created by Morningstar
'The Corporate Credit Analytics platform brings three tools together to replace fragmented, non-comparable data with consistent, comparable credit analysis,' a Morningstar release said.
Research
A Beneficiary of Social Security: Equities
Social Security is too often regarded as a zero-sum game between cohorts and time-periods. But it can help give retirees the risk-capacity to own and hold equities, exploit the...
New research papers from the Journal of Retirement
In the Fall issue of this quarterly publication, you'll find a story that recommends capping benefits at about $2,000, one that shows why a combination of income annuities and...
Research Roundup
We feature two deep-dive research papers on private credit. One is from Victoria Ivashina of Harvard Business School and the other from a team that includes Amir Sufi, co-author...
How Life Insurers Changed Alt-Asset Managers
A new research paper from Harvard Business School and State Street documents how publicly-traded alternative asset managers have channeled hundreds of billions of dollars from annuity issuers into their...
401(k) Annuities for ‘Pretty Good’ Lifetime Incomes
Recognizing the longevity gap that's correlated with education, three retirement scholars recommend default income annuities starting at age 67 for participants with only high school diplomas and age 80...
Cross-Fire: NAIC and Fed Economists Release Same-Day Zingers
On March 21, Federal Reserve economists published research warning about increases in high-risk lending by U.S. life insurers. On the same day, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners asked...
RIJ Launches the 401(k) Income Research Center
RIJ intends to give plan sponsors, plan advisors, retirement plan service providers and others an up-to-date, easy-to-access source of curated information and competitive intelligence on products and processes that...
Recurring Idea: Give the ‘Tax Expenditure’ to the Poor
The Penn Wharton Budget Model, a group that assesses new spending programs, calculates that, if the US Treasury eliminated the tax deduction for contributions to retirement plans, it could...
Test-drive annuities at CANNEX/Luma ‘Marketplace’
The Annuity Marketplace will provide income, rate, yield, and product information on annuities from more than 60 issuers, a CANNEX release said. Advisers can illustrate the outcomes of market...
Here Come the Suits
Close observers of the 'Bermuda Triangle' strategy weren't surprised when class action lawsuits were filed against AT&T, State Street Global Advisors and Lockheed Market for their choice of Athene...
How do 401(k) participants save? Vanguard knows.
Vanguard released its 2022 edition of 'How America Saves,' a compendium of data on millions of Vanguard-administered 401(k) plan accounts. Of participants ages 65+, half had balances under $88k....
Who Has ‘Three Legs at Evening’? (The Elderly)
The Pension Research Council's Spring Symposium took place (virtually), which meant no semi-formal dinner with the sphinx at the University of Pennsylvania's museum. But the presentations of research papers...
Who snagged the best investment results in 2021? Dalbar knows
Dalbar founder Lou Harvey's latest Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior shows how much more equity investors might have earned in 2021 if they had stuck to the fundamentals. But...
It’s Inflation or Recession: Larry Summers
In this research roundup, economist Larry Summers predicts a recession next year. We also review new papers on annuitization habits of TIAA participants, 'tontines' for Chile, shortages of...
Target-date fund assets grow to $3.27T: Morningstar
Five providers control 79% of the target-date market: Vanguard, Fidelity, BlackRock, State Street, and American Funds, according to Morningstar's 2022 Target-Date Strategy Landscape report.
Research Roundup
Almost every controversial subject in the US today--from Fed policy to machine learning to immigration--contains an element or theme related to retirement policy. The articles reviewed in this month's Research...
Charting the Bitcoin Universe (and other New Research)
This Research Roundup offers a map of the world of cryptocurrency trading, a look at 'Participating Longevity-Linked Annuities,' an investing strategy for low-yield times from David Blanchett, and answers...
Research Roundup
This month we bring you scholarly articles on the Social Security 'tax torpedo,' the likelihood of needing long-term care, the best decumulation strategies from DC plans, the people most...
Retirement assets total $37.2 trillion in 2Q2021
Assets in IRAs totaled $13.2 trillion at the end of 2Q2021, up 5.4% from the end of 1Q2021. Defined contribution (DC) plan assets were $10.4 trillion at the end...
