CalPERS Board to Study Impact of Income Inequality on Pension Funds

CalPERS’ Board of Administration will discuss the impact of income inequality on institutional investors at their next meeting, according to slides made available on the pension fund’s website.

The Board of Administration’s investment committee will discuss the issue next week.

More from the National Law Review:

The slide presentation prepared for next week’s meeting identify the following three priorities:

* Proxy Access

* Climate Change

* Exploration of Income Inequality

According to the slides, “exploration” consists of the CalPERS staff reading up on income inequality (or as expressed in slides, a “comprehensive review of research and analysis related to income inequality and its impact, if any, on institutional investors”). Apparently, the staff has already started reading because the slides include this quotation from Thomas Picketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century:

“When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.”

View the slides here.

Photo by  rocor via Flickr CC License