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Con Keating

Con Keating

Con Keating is a member of the steering committee of the financial econometrics research centre at the University of Warwick and of the Societe Universitaire Europeene de Recherche en Finance. As a research fellow of the Finance Development Centre he published widely on the regulation of financial institutions and pension systems. He has been Chairman of the committee on methods and measures of the European Federation of Financial Analysts Societies and is currently a member of their Market Structure Commission. Con has also served as an advisor and consultant to the OECD’s private pensions committee and a number of other international institutions, including the boards of a number of educational and charitable foundations and as a trustee of several pension schemes. He is currently Head of Research for the BrightonRock insurance group.

Web: http://www.futureofpensions.org
  • Pensions & Investment

    CPI shift makes public sector pensions much poorer value

    1st December 2011 — Filed under: Pensions & Investment

    Con Keating Con Keating

    Many commentators stress the notion that “fairness” is profoundly subjective.

    I will offer the following simple way of measuring fairness in pension saving. The proportion of our national output that we pay in contribution savings today should equal the proportion of national output that we receive as pensions in retirement.

    This seems eminently reasonable for any scheme member whether they work in the public or private sector. If you don’t get back what you contribute in this way, then the incentive is to consume today, rather than to provide for your retirement. If I get back what I have put in real and relative terms – if my share of the national cake is unchanged – that is fair.

    This gives us a way to assess the recent change in pensions indexation from the retail price index (RPI) to the consumer price index (CPI) for public sector (and many private sector) pensions.

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  • Pensions & Investment

    Inadequate pensions are a bigger problem than unaffordable ones

    21st September 2011 — Filed under: Pensions & Investment

    Con Keating Con Keating

    We are as a society living longer. We are asked to believe that this makes pensions unaffordable and unsustainable in both the public and private sectors. It is simply untrue. There is a tendency for analysts to suggest that demographics and population dynamics are undeniable, absolute truths. The fact is that over history we have made many such forecasts which have missed their mark by miles – Schumpeter’s 1943 observation that “Forecasts of future populations, from those of the seventeenth century on, were practically always wrong” remains as valid today.

    It is true that society is ageing, but the rate of increase of longevity is far lower than the rate of growth of output, GDP. We have, with the exception of occasional periods of recession, grown steadily wealthier, and as we grow wealthier so, by choice, we spend more, both absolutely and proportionally, on education, healthcare and retirement. If we had, in their infancy, told today’s ninety year-old that their consumption at this age would be some eight times more in real terms than a ninety year-old at that time, we would have been summarily dismissed as over-optimistic to the point of certifiable madness.

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  • Pensions & Investment

    No Change in Pensions

    15th November 2010 — Filed under: Pensions & Investment

    Con Keating Con Keating

    After twenty years of ever-increasing volumes and complexity of pension regulation, a brief conversation this week with a member of the Visteon scheme brought home to me the fact that very little has really changed. After 38 years of service, this individual will lose 48% of his pension entitlement under the Pension Protection Fund rules – is this really the best that we can do twenty years after the Maxwell scandal?

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