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Ireland
On 31 October 2023, the Screening of Third Country Transactions Act 2023 (the “Act”), which establishes a new foreign direct investment ("FDI") screening regime in Ireland, was enacted.
United Kingdom | Publication | February 2024
On February 7, 2024, the Work and Pensions Committee of the House of Commons published a lengthy report submitted by the Regulator on the impact DB schemes of the liability-driven investment (LDI) crisis in autumn 2022. The Committee published a report about the episode in June 2023 and asked the Regulator to produce a detailed account of the impact.
The Regulator’s report concludes that, while the situation in late September and early October 2022 bought into focus the extent of DB schemes' investments in leveraged LDI, the movement in gilt values and yields over 2022 actually led to a significant improvement in scheme funding, as liabilities fell by more than asset values.
However, the precise impact for individual schemes will not be known until completion of the next triennial valuation process. Some individual schemes may have experienced funding deteriorations during September 2022 on account of high levels of hedging, the cost of losing and re-acquiring hedging or following discounted selling of assets to meet collateral requirements. While the report models these impacts, the Regulator has no data on the extent and scope of discounted sales for specific schemes.
Since the LDI episode, the Regulator says it has improved its monitoring of such products, and it now receives weekly data from the five UK fund managers that hold almost 90 per cent of the DB market in leveraged LDI assets.
The Regulator's ongoing work includes:
Publication
On 31 October 2023, the Screening of Third Country Transactions Act 2023 (the “Act”), which establishes a new foreign direct investment ("FDI") screening regime in Ireland, was enacted.
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The EU Foreign Subsidies Regulation, or FSR, is intended to prevent or remedy distortions of the EU internal market caused by “foreign” – meaning non-EU – subsidies benefitting companies active in the EU.
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The conventional wisdom is that ‘securitisation caused the great financial crisis’ (GFC). A further piece of conventional wisdom is that this was due to the misalignment of incentives between securitisation originators and securitisation investors . This conventional wisdom in turn drove much of the regulation of securitisation we now have.
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