LONDON | Half an hour before the deadline passed at 20:00 GMT on Friday, the Greek minister for international economic relations Constantine Papadopoulos confidently told Sky News in London that default had been averted. “The indications we have are that the debt swap seems to be going well. Greece will get the necessary bailout as we have now cleared the major hurdle and can look forward to a new beginning,” Papadopoulos explained, although…
MADRID | Pablo Fernández, Javier Aguirreamalloa, Luis Corres Avendaño | In the period between December 2001 and December 2011, returns on the IBEX 35 were at 4.3% while government 10-year bonds’ were at 5.13%. Among the 532 pension funds with 10-year history, only two funds exceeded the return on 10-year sovereign bonds and only three funds exceeded the 4% return. Even worse, 191 funds had negative average return (in December 2011 these funds had 1.7 million participants and assets of €6.246 billion). A reasonable enough question, then: is the favourable fiscal discrimination…
