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The pension, benefits and HR consultancy highlighted the recent shift in pension schemes' investment attitudes to exchange low yielding government bonds for higher yielding corporate bonds.

However, Aon warned that this is likely to be impacted by regulatory changes for US credit rating agencies currently proposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Chris Erwin, investment principal at Aon Consulting, said: "Having missed the danger of the sub-prime crisis, credit rating agencies are being forced by the SEC to adopt new methodology that will mean companies will have to pay for their bonds to be rated, whether they like the outcome or not.

"In the short term the credit rating agencies are trying to fight this change to their business model, however, ultimately this severely raises the risk of a large number of downgradings."

Erwin added any credit rating downgrading were likely to have a "severe effect on the price and yield of individual corporate bonds".

"For corporate bonds it would mean prices would fall and yields would rise. This would give further scope for annuity issuers, as they are only concerned about the stream of income, not ratings," he said.

"For pension schemes the bad news is that it would damage capital values of holdings for those schemes with corporate bond investments."

As such, Erwin urged pension schemes with large corporate bond holdings to monitor developments closely after the new ratings system is adopted.