Mark Gilbert , Columnist

$1.5 Trillion Says: Eat What You Kill

One pension plan sends a shock wave round the fund management industry.

June 13, 2018 at 5:00 AM UTC

Mark Gilbert is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering asset management. A former London bureau chief for Bloomberg News, he is author of “Complicit: How Greed and Collusion Made the Credit Crisis Unstoppable.”

Wolves.
Photographer: Klaus Feichtenberger

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With 160 trillion yen ($1.5 trillion) to invest, Japan's Government Pension Investment Fund has an awful lot of clout. Its latest innovation is to oblige many of the outside firms that manage its money to eat what they kill rather than enjoy a free lunch from simply gathering assets. And where the world's biggest pension fund leads, the rest of the money-management industry looks bound to follow.

Less than three months after serving notice of a forthcoming change to how it remunerates its external partners, the fund this week revealed its new performance-based payment structure.