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Video: Discussing Investment Fees, Assumed Rates of Return and the Outlook of Public Pensions

The above video is a panel discussion from the Bloomberg Markets Most Influential Summit, which was held in New York on September 22.

The discussion is moderated by Bloomberg editor-at-large Tom Keene, and features Clifford Asness, managing and founding principal of AQR Capital Management, and John C. Bogle, founder of Vanguard Group Inc.

The pension discussions begin at around the 2:35 mark of the video.

Topics include investment fees, assumed rates of return, and the panelists “gloomy” outlook for public pensions.

A New Era of Pension Transparency In Boston? Not So Fast.

Last week, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) agreed to disclose its member’s pension benefits and to beef up its previously inadequate annual financial reports.

The retirement fund, called the “T” Fund, is among the most tight-lipped in the country because it is not required to follow public records laws.

But a Boston Herald editorial warns us not to cheer for this measure quite yet. The newspaper calls the agreement a “half-measure” that could easily be reversed. From the Boston Herald:

A deal struck between the MBTA and a union representing 3,000 of its workers to disclose more information about employee pensions is a disappointing half-measure. A mere contractual agreement, it could easily be revised in the future. To ensure public access to this vital financial information the disclosure agreement needs the force of law.

Data on T pensions has long been shrouded in secrecy. The MBTA retirement fund was originally formed as a “private” trust, and state courts have upheld that status. That means neither MBTA fare-payers nor state taxpayers have the legal right to data on the pensions that they subsidize.

Amid public pressure over the fund’s secret operations — the board’s investment decisions are private, too, and its meetings aren’t open to the public — Beacon Hill last year passed a law intended to subject the T’s pension fund to state public records and open meeting laws.

But opponents of the new requirement resisted the effort, and actually succeeded in convincing the state’s supervisor of public records that the fund still wasn’t required to open its books.

So much energy wasted, all to keep the public from examining data that should be available for anyone who’s ever swiped a Charlie Card to examine.

The deal struck last week requires the union to turn over data on employee pensions to the T monthly, and the T will then post it on the state’s Open Checkbook website. We are supposed to greet this development with cheers.

But we’d be curious to know what T management had to give up during negotiations to secure the agreement. And we’d note once again that a provision like this negotiated into a labor contract could easily be negotiated out in the future.

The “T” fund is still refusing to disclose documents related to investment losses associated with certain hedge funds.

Photo by Truthout.org via Flickr CC License

Oregon PERS Chooses Next Executive Director

Paul Cleary, who for ten years has sat at the helm of the Oregon Public Employees Retirement System, announced this summer that he would retire in December.

Since then, the Oregon PERS has searched for its next executive director. They’ve now announced their decision to promote from within: the next executive director will be Steve Rodeman, who currently serves as the fund’s deputy director.

The move comes on the heels of a push to move more of the fund’s investments in-house. From Chief Investment Officer:

Steve Rodeman, the deputy director of Oregon’s Public Employees Retirement System (PERS), has been chosen as the pension’s new executive director.

On Friday, the PERS board voted unanimously to elect the 13-year veteran to the post, local news website oregonlive.com reported.

In March, state lawmakers and public pension representatives pushed for legislative reform to align fiduciary responsibility and bring risk and portfolio management in-house.

Under current governance policy, the treasurer has authority over investment and personnel oversight and cash management via the Oregon Investment Council (OIC). As a result of this structure, the state has had to outsource much of its risk and portfolio management to Wall Street money managers.

Although Rodeman has been with PERS for more than a decade, his role has been on the operational rather than investment side of the organisation.

No official comment had been made by Oregon PERS at the time of going to press.

PERS considered 30 applicants for the job.

Rodeman will be paid an annual salary of $168,000.

Photo by Nathan Stephens via Flickr CC License

Time For New Jersey To Face the “Bitter Truth”, Says Pension Panel Chairman

The chairman of the New Jersey Pension and Health Benefit Study Commission, the panel assembled by Chris Christie to address the state’s pension problems, has published a column today in the New Jersey Star-Ledger.

In it, Thomas J. Healy writes about the “bitter truth” about pensions that people will have to swallow: that Christie’s previous reforms “did not come close” to fixing the problem and now the options for fixing the state’s pension system “are uninviting”.

From the column in the Star-Ledger:

It’s time for New Jerseyans to swallow some bitter truth about our state’s public employee pension and health benefit systems.

The commitment of elected officials over two decades to offer benefits that were unaffordable, coupled with the failure of the state to make required pension contributions when they were due, has landed New Jersey on the edge of a gaping fiscal cliff. Unless the crisis is dealt with firmly and comprehensively, it is certain to become more dire in the period ahead.

[…]

Concerted efforts have been made during the past 10 years to fix the problem. However, significant pension plan reforms in 2010 and 2011 have not come close to correcting two decades of underfunding by both Democratic and Republican administrations in Trenton.

Fortunately, awareness of the need to actively address the problem cuts across both parties. Former Gov. Jon Corzine has acknowledged that “current benefits are financially unsustainable.” And, in the course of naming a 10-member bipartisan commission on Aug. 1 to study the problem and recommend possible long-term solutions, Gov. Christie warned that “if we don’t do more, and we don’t do it now, the state will be forced to make harder choices in the future.”

While this bipartisan understanding is helpful, it doesn’t diminish the complexity of the job ahead, as outlined in the just-released status report of the New Jersey Pension and Health Benefit Study Commission. Indeed, the options for making the public employee pension and health benefits systems fiscally viable are uninviting. Employees have already made concessions, and a tax increase of the size necessary to fund the escalating cost of benefits (in a state which already has one of the highest tax burdens in the nation) is unrealistic. So is any effort to divert revenues from an already tight state budget.

The commission’s second report will propose specific recommendations for reforming New Jersey’s pension system.

The first report, which came out last week, presented an overview of the fiscal situation surrounding pensions but didn’t provide ideas for reform.

Missouri Auditor Offers First Glimpse of Upcoming Pension Report

Missouri Auditor Tom Schweich gave an interview to KSMU radio over the weekend, and in it he offered a sneak preview of his office’s audit of Missouri’s 90 public pension funds.

It’s the first wide-reaching audit of Missouri’s pension systems in 30 years. From the KSMU interview:

He says the good news is a majority of those pensions are “pretty solvent,” but noted that roughly five of the smaller ones in the state are in “serious trouble” and will require further review. Schweich declined to name those pensions ahead of the published audit.

“People wanna know ‘are our pensions solvent? Will we have to bail those pensions out? Will the people who are entitled to that pension money get the money?’ So I initiated a very lengthy and detailed study over a year ago of our 89 pension systems and in a few days we’ll release the results of that.”

Schweich says this will be the first comprehensive study that has been done on pensions in Missouri in over 30 years. He says sometimes pensions come down to a tax, or just good financial management.

“Sometimes they really have the money they’re just not investing it well, or they’re not handling it right or they have too much in the way of administrative costs. So we look at all those things. Our objective is to help pension become solvent if they’re not solvent, and make sure they remain solvent if they are.”

In April, voters in Springfield renewed the city’s ¾-cent police-fire pension sales tax. It was first brought before citizens in 2009, when the pension plan was estimated to be underfunded by $200 million. The plan is now projected to be brought into full funding within five years.

The report won’t be released until sometime in October, but it can eventually be found here.

Photo by Paul Sableman

The Ethics of Plan Design

Retirement plan designers often encounter ethical dilemmas over the course of their careers.

A recent paper in the Journal of Pension Benefits, authored by Kelly Marie Hurd, dives into some ethical scenarios that might be presented to plan consultants.

First: Clients need to know the regulations surrounding the plan – even if they don’t necessarily want to hear them:

To a client, the laws and regulations can feel like a foreign language at best or at worst can seem like a hindrance. However, they also can be an excellent safety net to help clients understand the importance of avoiding discrimination issues. The various tests that must be performed each year help keep the plan on the right path, and taking the time to explain those requirements, at least in a general way, during the implementation stage can go a long way to ensuring that your client has a basic understanding of what is and what is not permissible.

It’s also important the plan consultant untangle the web of competing interests being brought to the table:

Different types of retirement plan professionals bring different perspectives to the plan design process, perspectives that may be complementary or competing…

An investment advisor may be primarily concerned with enrollment and access for employees to boost participation in the plan, as well as maintaining relationships with the participants to help them meet their financial goals. While all of these are reasonable perspectives, they also may lead to differences of opinion when it comes to plan design. For example, the investment advisor may want to push auto-enrollment, while the TPA has concerns about the possibility for missed enrollments that would then lead to potentially costly corrections. Rather than competing over such questions, the investment advisor and TPA should work collaboratively to communicate the pros and cons of the different design options to arrive at the design that is best for the client to target benefits, expand participation, etc., while ensuring that the client has a compliant and qualified plan.

Finally, the author presents this scenario:

There are many times you wish you could explain something to your client about how the plan works in simple language, but the solution leads you into an area where you are explaining discrimination to your client in a way that might influence his or her hiring practices. I have a client, a professional office, where the owner employs three staff members. The owner is nearing retirement and hoping to put away the maximum amount each year, although he does not draw a large salary. The plan is a cross-tested plan, which means that to get to a 70 percent coverage level, all three of the staff members need to benefit at the same percentage as the owner. And in this company, the office manager is only a few years younger than the owner.

It seems like such an easy suggestion to tell the client to hire a part-time college-age worker and make him or her eligible for the plan, but at the end of the day that is a potentially abusive manipulation of both the retirement plan regulations and age discrimination laws. Rather than suggest demographic changes, I revisit the plan design each year to see if there is a better option based on the existing demographics. There may not always be a cookie-cutter solution, but it is our illustrious burden to continue to strive for that perfection.

To read the entire paper, titled “The Ethics of Plan Design”, click here [subscription required].

Photo by Stephen Wu via Flickr CC License

Controversial Retirement Plan Becomes Issue In Illinois Treasurer Race

Former House Republican Leader Tom Cross and Democratic Senator Mike Frerichs are both vying to become the next Treasurer of Illinois, and the race has gotten a little more interesting in the past few days.

Cross says that an early retirement incentive (ERI) plan, passed under Frerichs when he was the auditor of Champaign County, cost the county millions of dollars. But others say the plan saved the county millions.

Reported by WUIS:

Back in 2003, Mike Frerichs was the Champaign County Auditor when the County Board passed a plan that allowed some county employees to take early retirement.

An early retirement incentive, or ERI, is sometimes used by city or county governments, often as a way to cut payroll costs. At the time, Frerichs also served as the county’s agent to IMRF, the Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund.

Now, Cross, the former House Republican leader, said Frerichs put Champaign County in a financial hole by pushing the early retirement incentive on the county board.

“He ran (the numbers) and said let’s do it – it’s going to save us money,” Cross said. “We’ve now found out it costs $2-to-3 million – the county had to go sell bonds. So if you’re a rank and file county board member, you’re relying on this guy who’s the county board’s representative of IMRF, and you relied on that data and that information and recommendation.”

Frerichs fired back at Cross and said the accusations were inaccurate. From WUIS:

“Tom Cross’ campaign told lies about who instigated it, they told lies about how much it saved, and they told lies about the authorized agent,” [Frerichs] said.

Frerichs called the accusations from the Cross campaign, ‘revisionist history’.

The Senator said he was approached eleven years ago by Champaign County Administrator Deb Busey to prepare some numbers, and find out how many county employees might opt to retire early.

Tom Betz, a Democrat and a Champaign County Board member at the time, said a group of county employees pushed for the plan.

“A lot of people lobbied – because they wanted to retire,” he said. “And they wanted an incentive to retire.”

Frerichs said gathering data and presenting the information to the county administrator was the extent of his job as the county’s IMRF officer. After that, the proposal went to the full board for a vote, and passed 13-10, with bipartisan support.

The head of the pension fund backs Frerichs on that point. IMRF Executive Director Louis Kosiba said a city or county’s decision to implement the program — or not — has nothing to do with the authorized agent.

“To me it’s a kind of tempest in a teapot if you’re saying the authorized agent did something or didn’t do something vis a vis IMRF,” he said. “They’re just a communication conduit – they have no responsibility.”

ERI plans seek to replace highly paid employees with lower-paid employees. The plan is sometimes used by governments looking to downsize or cut costs.

WUIS further investigated the cost of the retirement program here.

John Bury: 4 Things The New Jersey Pension Panel Failed To Say

Over at Bury Pensions, actuary John Bury covers New Jersey pension developments as close as anyone. And there’s been a lot to talk about lately, as the New Jersey Pension and Health Benefit Study Commission just released their first report last week.

But what wasn’t in the report is just as important as what was. While the report served as a great primer on how New Jersey’s pension mess came to be, it fell short on some counts.

Here’s John Bury’s take on what was left out.

__________________

By John Bury

The report did a good job of piecing together available public information but anyone could have done that. What this panel of experts was supposed, and failed, to do is bring their knowledge of the truth of the situation to the general public. Perhaps some did not possess that knowledge and others who did wimped out but here is what should have been in the report:

Actuaries lie

A 54% funded ratio and $37 billion shortfall for the state portion of the New Jersey pension sounds bad enough but people should be aware that these figures are generated by actuaries whose sole responsibility to their politician clients is to keep contribution amounts low. Ask yourself how a plan returning 16.9% in trust earnings when it is assuming 7.9% worsens their shortfall. It’s primarily because of a flaw in basic actuarial math which is not being adjusted for since getting it right is not what public plan actuaries are paid for when right means higher contributions. Then there is the smoothing canard that the panel completely ignores, quoting the $44 billion actuarial value of assets as real rather than the $39.5 billion market value.

Politicians cheat

$14,9 billion in skipped ARC payments under Christie in cahoots with the legislature who not only get to decide how much they put in but they also get to brag that their selected mini-contributions are the full statutorily required amounts though they get to define what is statutorily required.

Benefits are protected

Hinted at on page 18:

One of the reasons the reforms described above have had little impact on the unfunded liability is that many of them do not apply to all current employees.

And the reason many recent reforms are not applied successfully (witness the COLA fiasco) is that Christie Whitman in 1997 exchanged constitutional protection of those benefits for the ability to reduce contributions to a desired level (i.e. nothing). That needs to be admitted and reforms must include either paying for all those promised benefits in full or coming up with some strategy to get public employees to agree to reduce their benefits voluntarily.

Hybrid plans won’t work here

Though a Defined Contribution plan is the only type of plan that governments, run by political considerations and without independent funding discipline, should be allowed to sponsor moving new employees into these plans would only worsen the underfunding since a valuable input into the ponzi scheme New Jersey currently runs (employee contributions) would be shut off and new hires who are typically younger could wind up getting even higher benefits than under an age-weighted defined benefit system. In the private sector the shift to cash balance plans worked because older employees could be forced (or tricked into) accepting them. It would take a massive amount of ‘creativity’ and will to work the same magic in the public sector where employees have more leverage and politicians are not bargaining with their own money.

Pension Funds React, Weigh Next Move After Bond Guru’s Departure From PIMCO

Bill Gross, bond guru and co-founder of investment management firm PIMCO, has left the company. Gross’ is only the latest in a string of high-level departures from the firm.

Some wealth managers had exited PIMCO earlier this year after sensing that the “team was falling apart.”

But how are pension funds reacting?

Here’s CalPERS’ take, from Bloomberg:

The California Public Employees Retirement System, the largest U.S. pension, said it doesn’t have plans to change its investments with Pimco, according to an e-mailed statement today.

“Calpers has respect for both Bill Gross and Pimco investment professionals,” the pension system said. Calpers, which has about 1.5 percent, or $1 billion, of its fixed-income assets in a Pimco international bond fund.

New Mexico PERS isn’t ready to make any decisions, either. But the Florida SBA, the entity that manages investments for the state’s pension funds, is watching PIMCO closely. Bloomberg reports:

Jon Grabel, chief investment officer of the Public Employees Retirement Association of New Mexico, said it’s too early to make a decision about moving assets. Pimco manages about $725 million for the association in a separate account, Grabel said.

“One person may get the headlines, but one person doesn’t manage trillions of dollars,” he said.

The Florida State Board of Administration, which manages $147 billion in its Florida Retirement System Pension Plan, has been monitoring Pimco since El-Erian left. The fund has $1.9 billion invested in Pimco and nothing in Janus, said Dennis MacKee, a spokesman for the pension.

Pimco is on the system’s watch list, which isn’t a precursor to redemption, MacKee said. It means the board is looking closely at the funds’ performance and operations and will meet with consultants and investment staff to decide what to do, he said.

New York’s Common Fund and Indiana PERS are taking a similar approach: they’ve not yet moved on from PIMCO, but have placed the firm on a ‘watch list’, reports Bloomberg:

New York City’s five pension funds are evaluating the situation at Pimco, the New York City Office of the Comptroller said in an e-mailed statement. Total assets of the funds for firefighters, police officers, teachers, school administrators and civil servants is about $160.5 billion.

The $30.2 billion Indiana Public Retirement System said Pimco remains on its watch list and it’s monitoring developments, Jennifer Dunlap, a spokeswoman for the pension fund, said in an e-mailed statement. The retirement plan had put Pimco on its list in January.

Gross left PIMCO to take a job at Janus Capital Group Inc.

Gross said he wanted to take a job that allowed him to get closer to his original passion: trading bonds.

Canada Pension Plan Invests $325 Million in U.S. Cancer Treatment Provider

The Canada Pension Plan has invested $325 in 21^st Century Oncology Holdings Inc., a cancer care service provider. The details, from Reuters:

Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), the investment arm of Canada’s national pension plan, said on Friday it has invested $325 million in privately held radiation oncology services provider 21st Century Oncology Holdings Inc through purchases of convertible preferred shares.

Fort Myers, Florida-based 21st Century operates the world’s largest integrated network of cancer treatment centers and affiliated physician practices. It has 179 treatment centers in the United States and in six Latin America countries.

The investment will give CPPIB the right to nominate two directors to 21st Century’s board.

An active global dealmaker, CPPIB manages net assets of C$226.8 billion on behalf of the Canada Pension Plan.

More details on 21st Century Oncology, from BusinessWeek:

21st Century Oncology Holdings, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, operates as a physician-led provider of integrated cancer care services.

As of February 19, 2014, 21st Century Oncology Holdings, Inc. operated 179 treatment centers primarily under the 21st Century Oncology brand, including 145 centers located in 16 states of the United States; and 34 centers located in 6 countries in Latin America. It was formerly known as Radiation Therapy Services Holdings, Inc. and changed its name to 21st Century Oncology Holdings, Inc. in December 2013. The company was founded in 1983 and is based in Fort Myers, Florida.

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