Thursday, April 23, 2009

Investing in infrastructure

OECD has an informative recent overview paper Pension Fund Investment in Infrastructure. The author looks at whether or not infrastructure deserves to be classified as a separate asset class (the evidence is inconclusive), risk-return profiles and benchmarks and other key items. But most interesting is the assessment of the barriers to pension fund investments, of which there are a great many. These are probably hard to overcome, except for the best run of institutions.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

New online resources

The design is about as appealing as can be expected from a body of professional accountants, but we are talking about the newly free access to an important part of the world's economic operating system, namely International Financial Reporting Standards, together with the statements of International Financial Reporting Interpretation Committee (IFRIC) and Standing Interpretation Committee (SIC). Now we have the narrative to go with the taxonomy ...

Slightly less globally relevant is the recent availability of the Swiss XBRL Jurisdiction's website.