Design key to Canada’s pension plan
[Financial Times]

Like many developed nations, Canada continues to refine its retirement system. As part of that effort, the provincial governments will soon authorise a new savings vehicle – Pooled Registered Pension Plans (PRPPs). With the right policy decisions, PRPPs will go a long way towards increasing retirement security for millions of Canadians.

Canada already has a sophisticated retirement savings system. It has a financially stable public pension programme, and it offers substantial tax benefits to private savings. Even with those incentives, however, less than half of all Canadian workers – highly concentrated in large employers – participate in a private plan.

Read the rest at the FT

Caught in a bind over closing tax loopholes [Financial Times]

Congress is being pulled in opposite directions by rising concerns about budget deficits and continuing pressures to prop up a fragile economy. This means it probably enact the higher tax rate on incentive fees of fund managers proposed in The American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act of 2010, writes Robert Pozen

How to keep politics out of rating agency reform [FT]

By requiring a neutral third party to select the rating agency, Congress would significantly improve the quality of bond ratings relied on by small institutions and individual investors. Yet this approach avoids excessive political influence on the ratings process by limiting the government’s role to the minimum necessary to avoid ratings shopping.