Welcome to the weekend, everybody. Here’s some news for your reading enjoyment:
- Geographic Contraction: The biggest sovereign fund on earth, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, is closing its London office, which also happens to be its only overseas office.
- Gathering Assets: For all you paranoiacs worried hedge funds are only focused on asset gathering and not focused on delivering value to clients, you’re not paranoid. You’re right.
- Real Estate: Norway’s Giant is considering a massive 15% allocation to real estate, which implies $130 billion in real estate holdings . . .
- Rolling Stones: Both of Korea’s sovereign funds — the Korea Investment Corporation and the National Pension Service — lost leadership teams last week over some seemingly odd circumstances.
- The Fee Machine I: Ohio SERS joins a long list of pensions that are now finding it hard to ignore the fact that they have absolutely no clue what they are really paying their private equity GPs . . .
- The Fee Machine II: The SEC snagged private equity GP Fenway Partners bamboozling clients. Drip. Drip. Drip . . .
- The Fee Machine III: Only 18% of endowments report the performance comp. (i.e., carry) they pay to their external managers to their own stakeholders. My guess is that, like the pension funds, they simply don’t know what they are paying.
- The Fee Machine IV: Here’s how much one pension (thinks it) pays wall street: $708 million. Honestly, it’s probably paying a lot more than that, but at least that humber hints at the insanity.
- The Fee Machine V: According to Bill Gross, “...PIMCO has been deliberately obfuscating the allocation of some fees in order to make it easier for the firm to raise them.” Why wasn’t he complaining about the practice when he was a beneficiary, I wonder.
- Selfie: I co-authored a new paper on a rather creative new source of sovereign wealth: immigrants.
Have a great weekend!
