A Kansas doctor reviled by anti-abortion groups for his work providing “late-term” abortions was shot and killed in his Wichita, Kansas church.

Representatives from Britain’s Abortion Rights and ProLife Alliance share their thoughts on the murder of George Tiller. What is your opinion?

– Margaret Doyle is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are her own –

Apparently, investors in Man Group’s flagship fund value liquidity and safety above performance. At least Peter Clarke, the company’s chief executive, hopes so.

He needs them to do so because, over the last five months, the investors in AHL, Man’s “black box” quantitative fund, have been suffering. Unlike many rival funds, Man did not “gate” its funds during the market panic, and Clarke believes that investors will remember this and reward Man for it.

Clarke says that the punters, who account for the bulk of Man’s $44 billion of funds under management, bought $2.6 billion of Man’s funds since the end of March, but the institutions are still running for the exit.

Moreover, private investors are switching out of guaranteed products, which put a floor under investors’ losses and which generate a higher margin for Man, into lower-yielding open-ended funds. Moreover, institutional investors are continuing to withdraw their money.

Man maintains that they are taking cash out because they can — other funds remain locked up-and that the trend will moderate soon. As Clarke put it, investors are looking for more exposure to the market.

However, quantitative, “black box” funds, like AHL or the famed Renaissance Technologies in the U.S., which follow market trends, are designed to do well whatever the market does. Perversely, this means they often do badly when the market does well.

AHL did well last year, generating a return of 33 percent when world stocks fell almost 40 percent. However, it completely missed out on the recent rally.

As Man admits, it does cope well when the market whipsaws. Man is investing in a new Oxford research centre. However, any new algorithm is unlikely to come fast enough to address the collapse in its assets under management.

This has had a catastrophic effect on both performance and management fees, driving a 40 percent fall in profit last year. Clarke says that he sees no pressure on the 4 percent-plus annual fee that Man charges its private customers.

He has, however, detected a demand for transparency. Once investors see how much they are paying for Man’s products — especially when they are not performing — they will continue to put their money elsewhere.

(Edited by David Evans)

- Michelle Mitchell is Charity Director of Age Concern and Help the Aged. The opinions expressed are her own. -

Reports in the media about job losses are commonplace these days, with young people’s struggle to find work dominating coverage. Yet at the other end of the age spectrum, the lives and future prospects of older workers have been set in turmoil by the recession.

Unemployment among older workers has increased by nearly 50 percent in the last year and for many people in their 50s, the repercussions of losing their job now will be felt long into their retirement. As their working lives are cut prematurely short and their ability to pay into pensions becomes impossible, they face the double whammy of financial hardship now and a retirement blighted by poverty later.

Although the reasons for the high number of job losses among this group vary, many over 50s feel their age is a factor in employers’ decisions about who to hire and fire. Our research shows nearly one in four over 50s fear that if their employer decides to make cut backs, they will be forced out because of their age.

Despite legislation being in place to protect workers under 65 against age discrimination in the workplace, in reality, the attitudes of employers and wider society hasn’t kept pace with the law.

For those that have lost their job, the future looks bleak: because the odds of finding another job are sadly stacked against older people. Unemployed men aged 50 plus only have a one in five chance of being in work two years later. For many over 50s, this is the first time they have been without a job since they entered the workplace many years ago and the skills needed to find a new job in today’s marketplace are very different.

They are faced with new buzz words and jargon, job searches conducted online, a move away from the reliance on references towards “skills-based” interviews. While these new skills to get back into work can be acquired, those in their 50s are at an immediate disadvantage and it can prove daunting and demoralising.

In addition, older applicants feel they have to work doubly hard to overcome the ageist attitudes they are faced with, both at interview and more generally. Many people in their 50s have reported that despite having the skills and experience for jobs they have interviewed for, they were unsuccessful, leading many to feel that their age could be part of the problem.

We cannot allow ageist attitudes and a lack of support for unemployed over 50s to condemn a generation to long term unemployment and pensioner poverty – action is needed.

Firstly, the Government must start by matching its help for younger workers with a tailored package of support for unemployed over 50s. This should include specialised training for JobCentre Plus staff to recognise the specific needs of older people job searching and provide them with meaningful, holistic support.

Employers need to take steps to ensure they are giving all applicants a fair chance and Government should provide them with greater financial incentives to take on over 50s out of work for more than six months.

Inevitably, for some people, this recession will mean missing out on a large chunk of their working life, with our research showing a massive 60 per cent of people say they the downturn means they will need to work longer than planned.

Which is why Government must seize the opportunity the Equality Bill presents and scrap the senseless national default retirement age. Only this change in law will enable people to continue working for as long as they want or need to.

Until this change comes, Britain will continue to fail vast numbers of its population and prevent older people from leading fulfilling and independent later lives.

Well-intentioned legislation often has the opposite effect. The European Commission’s new alternative investment directive threatens investment trust companies, an attractive form of pooled investment.

The Commission aims to “enhance investor protection.” However, in addition to hedge funds, the original French and German target, investment trusts would be caught in the new regulatory net. Unlike other pooled funds, investment trusts offer transparency, low fees, the discipline of a public limited company and a vote.

For retail investors, trusts offer a cheap and easy way to diversify their investments. Because they are PLCs, they are subject to the British Companies Act, and the directive offers nothing by way of improvement. Moreover, it would impose obligations that may be impossible to meet.

Investment trusts have been around since 1868, when Foreign & Colonial enabled individuals to put money into the United States. Now, some 434 London-listed trusts manage around 75 billion pounds. They allow investors to put money into India and China, private equity, property, collateralised loan obligations and every other corner of the market.

They differ from unit trusts in that they are closed ended, i.e. the size of the portfolio is unaffected by shareholders buying and selling. Management costs tend to be low and, because they are closed-ended, the only other cost is the market spread on the shares.

The new directive would require funds to be independently valued. This is irrelevant for trusts. The transparency directive already obliges trusts to produce quarterly figures, but most trusts produce a daily net asset value. They already have an independent board that oversees valuation, and can sack the manager for poor performance.

Another provision of the directive seeks funds to offer immediate redemption of their investment. This is incompatible with the PLC structure. Investors can already trade shares daily in the open market — they simply have to take their chance with the share price on the day.

The directive limits “alternative” funds to professional investors, which would bar investment trusts from the investors who have most to gain from buying them.

Investment trusts companies are a British investment phenomenon. The Association of Investment Companies hope simply that the Commission has simply not thought about them.

The simple solution is to exclude any share traded on an EU-regulated exchange. Otherwise, this risks looking like another poke in the eye for “Anglo-Saxon capitalism”.

(Edited by David Evans)

- Paul Dorfman is with the Nuclear Consultation Group and a senior research fellow at the University of Warwick. The opinions expressed are his own.

“Justification” of new-build nuclear power is a high-level assessment of whether the benefits of building new nuclear plants outweigh the detriments. Once the justification decision has been taken it will be difficult if not impossible to re-open this major issue.

And there are real problems - for example, information on how radiation-waste and radiation-spent fuel from any new nuclear build could possibly be managed, or the health impact of radiation-discharges will not be fully assessed until after the “Justification” decision is taken. “Justification” of new-build nuclear power will be decided even before the new reactor design is assessed.

Also there are significant data gaps in the Nuclear Industry Association (NIA) Application on which “Justification” is built. There is simply not enough information presented by the NIA in their application to make a rational decision about whether new nuclear build is warranted or not. For such a significant process, the Justification timeline is short, and decisions will take place in closed session – far from public scrutiny.

The Nuclear Consultation Group believe that it is unfair that that the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change is to be the Justifying Authority – the person who makes the final decision – this is because he has already expressed clear support for new nuclear reactors.

Given that Justification, once finalised, may foreclose on any future discussion on issues crucial to nuclear power, it is vital that this process is opened up in order to allow for meaningful and realistic examination of evidence a public forum.

Because the Justification of new nuclear power in the UK represents a key issue for trust in governance concerning energy policy and the control of radiation risk, we believe the Government should hold an independent inquiry, as allowed for under the regulations governing Justification: The Justification of Practices Involving Ionising Radiation Regulations 2004 (No. 1769), Regulation 17.

- Margaret Doyle is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are her own –

Sir Victor’s Blank cheque has finally bounced. Drawn on the Bank of Gordon, it looked like a dodgy piece of paper from the start, and now it has been sent back, marked “Refer to Drawer”.
Shares in Lloyds Banking Group rose in relief that someone, anyone, has finally agreed to take the rap for the disastrous takeover of HBoS, at the behest of the UK government, during last year’s financial panic.
Dazzled by the prospect of a market position in the UK which the competition authorities would never have allowed in normal times, Blank and his chief executive Eric Daniels failed to look their gift horse in the mouth, and discovered it was really a broken-down old nag.
The acquisition obscured the fact that the Black Horse itself was hardly in shape, and even without the handicap of HBoS, would almost certainly have been obliged to limp to the government for help. That is as much Daniels’ fault as Blank’s, and he will have to pay once a new chairman has been found.
This will not be easy. It would surely be too venal, even for this government, to impose finance minister Alistair Darling on the suffering shareholders, once he finds himself out of a job next year.
Lord Sandy Leitch, the Labour luvvie elevated to deputy chairman at the weekend, might fancy his chances, but his background is in insurance. The fashion for bank chairman who know nothing about banking has, mercifully, been blown away by the crisis.
More sensibly, Lord Mervyn Davies seems to have little to do since he quit Standard Chartered Bank <STAN.L> for the administration, while Doug Flint from HSBC would be a fine, and popular choice as chief executive if he could face the challenge.  He’s a Scot, which would also play well in the Brown bunker.
However, John Kingman, the civil servant in charge of UK Financial Investments, the government’s fig leaf covering its 43 percent stake in the bank, had signally failed to endorse Blank’s re-election at the forthcoming annual meeting. Perhaps he is showing signs of independence after all.
Philip Hampton, who was ousted as finance director from Lloyds five years ago for urging a cut in the dividend, would have been the ideal candidate. Unfortunately, he was tapped to chair RBS last January.

Win Bischoff, 67, who stepped down as chairman of Citigroup earlier this year, may consider another politically-contentious banking chairmanship unpalatable.
Whoever heads the new team has much to do. The combine is barely profitable, and more write-offs from the massive property-backed loan books, both domestic and commercial, are a racing certainty. It will be a long time before the Black Horse starts to show the paces that Blank expected when he galloped in without thinking last September.

- David Kuo is director at The Motley Fool. The opinions expressed are his own. -

The Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee decided to leave interest rates unchanged at 0.5 percent in May. This came as no great surprise given that the Central Bank has already slashed interest rates to a level where further cuts would have made no discernible difference to the cost of money.

That said, there are other ways to drive down the cost of money. In this regard, the Central Bank still has plenty of gunpowder left in its keg to blast the UK economy out of the doldrums. So far, it has only printed two-thirds of the 75 billion pounds of fresh money authorised by the Government for quantitative easing. It can pump in another 75 billion pounds into the economy after that. So, in total, it has 150 billion pounds in its armoury.

It can be argued that the Bank now has little choice but to continue pumping money into credit markets through quantitative easing given that cutting interest rates has not worked. After all, the problem that that UK faces is not the cost of money but instead the quantity of money.

Curiously, pumping 50 billion pounds into the credit markets has yet to have an effect on broad money growth. But at some point quantitative easing will increase money supply. However, it will come at a heavy price – inflation.

Of course inflation appears to be subdued at the moment, though this depends on which inflation index is used to measure the rise in the cost of living. The Retail Prices Index (RPI) has fallen to zero but the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) rose from 3 percent to 3.2 percent. The latter, which excludes mortgage costs, suggests that the cost of living is still going up at a time when consumers have little appetite to spend money.

The danger for consumers is that when Quantitative Easing begins to work, the surge of money and credit into the economy could boost inflation significantly. It is therefore vital that savers ensure they are properly invested in assets that keep pace with inflation.