April 24, 2026
08:00 AM
Until
April 24, 2026, 09:00 AM
1h
Water, Farmland, Housing: The Growing Appetites of Pension Fund Capitalism
Large pension funds from just seven global North countries have become enormous financial investors in their own right. A critical analysis of ‘pension fund capitalism’ has emerged alongside these actors, underlining various contradictory relationships. On one hand, the financial operations of dispossession and extraction of large pension fund investors is generating social resistance. On the other hand, neoliberalism continues to channel the worker struggles for a decent retirement income into predatory private finance.
Kevin Skerrett will examine the emergence of a new and powerful stratum of pension fund investors that, no longer content to passively collect coupon interest and stock dividends, have moved hundreds of billions into direct, private equity style investing in some of the most ecologically sensitive and socially contested sectors in the world. Newer private market ownership models allow pension funds to seize opportunities to take over the key components of daily survival – water, arable land, and housing. In 2012, the Economist magazine referred to the Canadian entrants into this world, and their appetite for the UK’s privatized water companies, airports, and rail operations as the ‘new masters of the universe’. Earlier hopes that pension fund actors may represent a more green, humane, and accountable type of owner are being replaced by more sober recognition that they now represent a powerful layer of capitalists keen to take advantage of weakened host country governments of the global South – and North. The discussion will focus on the need to adjust political and social movement strategies accordingly.