OMFIF’s Gender Balance Index 2026

The OMFIF has released the latest iteration of its Gender Balance Index. Thery summarize its results this way:

For 12 years, OMFIF’s Gender Balance Index has analysed the state of gender parity in leadership roles across the financial sector. This year’s central banks recorded significant gains: Central banks saw the biggest improvements within leadership positions in the index this year.
The number of women governors reached a historic score of 35, six of whom head the regional Federal Reserve Banks.
This is the highest number of women who have led the regional Feds in a single year.Αt a critical moment when US federal and private organisations were under pressure to remove diversity, equity and inclusion information and abandon related initiatives, these trends suggest that progress in gender representation within central banks has continued.

The report reflects the sensibilities and taxonomies of the 2oth century transformation of identity based politics into the economic, social, cultural, and political spheres. And yet at the same time it is a marker of the obsolescence of those taxonomies and their semiotics—that is the obsolescence of the signification of sex and gender within a set of binary significs—male and female; man and woman.

The identity politics of the 20th century and its more formidably powerful insemination of cultural production within the generative fields of negotiations between individuals and collectives respecting the (re) construction of the female and with it the category woman continues. But it has been upended by the explosion of the binaries of the categorizations of the human, and the fusion of biology with its social signification, and then its reconstitution enhanced by advances in technologies, into a fluidity og both biology (that can be chemically and surgically altered); psychology (which can be a bridge between the body and the identity of the mind within a physical body), and the possibilities of multiple existence within physical and virtual spaces.

Read in this way, and in the spirit of the sensibilities of the ruling group within the normative framework of which these initiatives have been crafted, signified and provided pathways for communal interpretation, one might come to wonder whether, indeed, it replicates the hierarchies of sex and gender, and the semiotics of the signification (and constraints) of both within the cognitive cages of a society in which neither sex nor gender easily conforms to the forms and pathways that make reports like this entirely meaningful within its own cognitive normative premises.

More information about the report with links to acquiring a copy is provided below.

Klasus Larres: What Europe's Tunnel Vision Misses: despite continuing tension with the Trump administration, a new pragmatism is essential. Insights from the GlobSec 2026 Forum

 

 My friend and colleague Klaus Larres has just published a quite interesting take on the state of Europe, or perhaps better put the state of the crisis in Europe, one that is only now becoming clearer. That crisis touches not just on the state of European economies and integration, but also on its political cultures, its institutional cultures of governance, and the ideological neural networks of its fundamental political line.  All of this at a time when many in Europe appear willing to reconsider who their friends and enemies arte among the larger powers that keep nudging themselves into European political life. 

 Here is his description: 

"WHAT EUROPE'S TUNNEL VISION MISSES"  is a new essay which I have just published on my Substack. "What Europe's Tunnel Vision Misses:  Despite Continuing Tension with the Trump Administration, a new Pragmatism is Essential. Insights from the GlobSec 2026 Forum."

 

The essay is a slightly revised English version of an op ed published in German in my column "Understanding America" for the German daily newspaper 'Koelner Stadtanzeiger' (Monday, June 1, 2026).  If you like the essay, then please subscribe to my Substack for Free.  And feel free to ask your friends and family to do so too. https://klauslarres.substack.com/

The point is fairly straightforward: in the face of what the  Europeans and fellow traveler  global elites perceive as the incompetence of the Trump Administration, what is to be done with or without the U.S. And yet oddly they continue to rehash increasingly other worldly iterations of historical hand wringing about the status of Ukraine in and as Europe (especially with respect to NATO and EU membership). And the contempt for the US-Israeli actions in the middle east appeared to be generally shared, and with it, an assessment: "So far, China has been the strategic winner of Trump’s misguided Middle East policy. The U.S. is increasingly viewed—not least in the non-Western world—as a hotbed of chaos and a source of war and instability, while China is able to position itself as a supposed pole of stability and reliability." They continue to fret about the pervasiveness of Russian influence on their political discourse and cultures. And so on.

The problem (for Europe) of course, is that all of this analysis is plausible only from and within the cognitive cage within which Europeans continue to operate.  In essence they both neither understand nor can tolerate the fundamental shift in cognitive orientation of the U.S. from that of an institutional-bureaucratic form to that of the merchant-transactionalist cognitive orientation (see, discussion at The Conceptual Architecture of America First—Ideological Transactionalism and the Case of Cuba). From the institutional perspective they are of course absolutely correct; but from that of the merchant-transactional their anaysis is certainly less relevant and unlikely to resonate with the Americans. Bu that may be the point. The hope is that the Trump Administration's approach to the transformation of the fundamental political line of the Republic will not outlast the Trump Presidency and that one must prepare for some sort of return to "cognitive normalcy" after 2028. It is not clear, though, that this is likely to occur. While the European conversation is vitally important on its own terms, and on that basis respected and considered, it also suggests the current failures of US-European dialectics and the necessary independence of European action on their own terms (something that ironically enough, the Americans appear to be encouraging--as long as trade and markets are not too badly affected).  Though from a different perspective Larres point is well taken: "OVERALL: Europe must become more pragmatic and creative—and quickly. Lamenting missed opportunities and venting anger over the Trump administration’s enormous incompetence may provide emotional relief, but they achieve nothing."

The Essay, which may be accessed in its original form here, is reproduced below.

 

 

Global SWF June 2026 Report and Interview With Border to Coast Pensions Partnership (Fund of the Month)

 

   

Our friends at Global SWF have announced the distribution of their June 2026 Report. They summarize its contents this way:

 

Sovereign Investors had a very strong May, with US$ 26.2 billion in 70 transactions, the highest volume since March 2024. Read all about the deals, results, new funds, and appointments at the Global SWF Times. In fact, Gulf SWFs have not slowed down and have maintained a stronger investment pace in the past quarter, than in the five years prior to the start of the war in Iran – as shown by the infographic of the month.

We celebrate the 50th and 45th year anniversaries of ADIA and GIC, respectively, by comparing two of the world’s largest allocators. The latter has played safer and has generated a lower return than the former. In addition, we have a look at the recent reform of the Local Government Pension Schemes (LGPS) in the UK, and the resulting map of pensions per county and how they are all pooled into different schemes.

In that context, the fund of the month goes to Border to Coast Pensions Partnership. Do not miss our conversation with the pool’s CIO, Mr. Joe McDonnell, and Chief Stakeholder Officer, Mr. Ewan McCulloch. The June report can now be accessed at  https://globalswf.com/reports/june2026  (if your firm is a subscriber of Global SWF and you forgot your password, you can always reset it with your email at https://globalswf.com/password/reset). And if your firm is not a subscriber yet, feel free to reach out to us.

 

The Global SWF maintains a Global SWF Data Platform which focuses on State-Owned Investors, including Central Banks (CBs), Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs), and Public Pension Funds (PPFs).

Pix credit here (https://globalswf.com/)

 

The text of the SWF’s Fund of the month interview with the UK's  Border to Coast Pensions Partnership's Chief Investment Officer (Mr. Joe McDonnell) and its Chief Stakeholder Officer (Mr. Ewan McCulloch), follows below