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Kentucky Teachers Pension Presents Bond Proposals To Lawmakers

We learned on Wednesday that the Kentucky Teachers’ Retirement System (KTRS), one of the most under-funded education retirement funds in the country, was seeking funding help from the state legislature.

Now, many more details have emerged about the proposals the System has presented to lawmakers. KTRS presented lawmakers with two options. The Courier Journal has the details:

KTRS suggested Wednesday that lawmakers consider two borrowing scenarios in the 2015 legislative session, and supporters say the proposals could reduce taxpayer cost in the long run while helping the system cope with $13.8 billion in unfunded liabilities.

One option involves a $1.9 billion bond to help fully fund the retirement system for the next four years and eventually decrease annual pension costs about $500 million by fiscal year 2026.

A second option includes a $3.3 billion bond that could fully fund the system for eight years and reduce annual costs in 2026 by around $445 million.

Both plans are based on 30-year bonds with interest rates in the range of 4 percent, and either option could be funded by re-purposing debt service and revenue streams that already exist in the state budget, according to KTRS.

Beau Barnes, KTRS general counsel and deputy executive secretary of operations, said the system is not “wild about bonding.” But he argued that liabilities are growing at 7.5 percent a year and compared the proposal to refinancing a home at a lower interest rate.

“We were asked what we could do for the pension fund without requiring additional dollars out of current budgets, and these were the only things we could think of,” Barnes said. “We didn’t really see any other alternative.”

KTRS has at least one lawmaker on their side. House Speaker Greg Stumbo voiced his support for the plan, according to MyCn2 News:

“I think we need to listen very carefully to it and work with them to try to craft some form of a proposal, which hopefully we can get enough support to pass in both chambers because these market rates won’t be favorable much longer in my judgement,” Stumbo, D-Prestonsburg, said in the committee meeting, noting the Federal Reserve will likely get pressure from banks to raise interest rates as the economy improves.

“… What they’re saying is we can’t tarry. If we wait too long, we’ll lose this window of opportunity.”

KTRS manages $18.5 billion in assets.

Pulitzer Prize Winner: Hedge Funds Not Worth The Risk For Pensions

David Cay Johnston, former Pulitzer prize-winning reporter for the New York Times and lecturer at Syracuse University, has written a column calling for pensions to stop risking assets with hedge funds.

He says the nature of hedge funds make the investment “not suited” for pension funds. First, he takes hedge funds to task for their fee structure. From the piece, published on Al-Jazeera:

Hedge funds charge hefty fees. Many hedge funds charge what is known in the trade as 2 and 20. That is for a 2 percent annual management fee, or $20,000 per $1 million, and 20 percent of all gains. Julian Simon’s Renaissance Technologies charges a 5 percent base and 44 percent of gains. From 1982 through 2009, when it averaged extraordinary 35 percent annual returns after expenses, that was a great deal, but since then, Simon has underperformed the market.

Compare these numbers with the very well-managed ExxonMobil pension fund, which its latest disclosure reports show has overhead charges of less than $1,200 per $1 million. Vanguard 500 investors pay as little as $500 annually to manage $1 million.

To get a better sense of the numbers, consider a year when the market return is 5 percent and a hedge fund earns that. On a $1 million investment, after a 2 percent management fee and a 20 percent profit performance fee, the hedge fund investor will be ahead by $19,200, or less than 2 percent; the Vanguard investor will be ahead by $49,950, or almost 5 percent.

The other facet of his argument is that hedge funds, while not necessarily a bad investment for other entities, are not a “prudent” investment for pension funds to make. From the editorial:

Hedge funds simply are not appropriate for taxpayers and public-sector workers. They are, rather, for wealthy speculators willing to take big risks in the hopes of earning big rewards while being able to tolerate the chance that an investment will shrivel or even be wiped out.

Pension money should be invested prudently. “Prudent” comes from the word “provident,” meaning to prepare for the future. And while its origins are in religious concepts, failing to prudently handle earthly money can turn the end of life into hell.

Given survivor benefits in pension plans, these pools of money should be treated as widows-and-orphans money. Under ancient and well-tested principles, the money of such vulnerable people must be invested with exceptional care to safeguard from loss. That means investment-grade bonds (more on that below) and either blue chip stocks or broad indexes.

Only with the rise in the last six decades of modern portfolio theory — investing in many different arenas to spread risk — have we gotten away from the idea that for widows, orphans and pensioners, only high-grade corporate bonds and a few blue chip stocks paying big dividends are appropriate investments.

The rest of the piece can be read here.

Fixed-Income ETFs Gain Traction With Canadian Funds

Exchange-traded funds are becoming an increasingly popular investment vehicle for institutional investors around the world, but that trend is especially true among Canadian pension funds, according to a new study.

One type of ETF was particularly popular: fixed-income.

The study, which interviewed public and corporate pension funds as well as foundations and endowments, found that 57 percent of institutional asset managers are using fix-income ETFs in 2014. In 2013, that number was 45 percent.

The report, produced by Greenwich Associates, offered some reasons for the growing popularity of bond ETFs. From the Financial Post:

“Increasingly, institutional funds and asset managers are viewing ETFs not simply as useful tools for making tactical adjustments to portfolios, but rather as efficient methods for implementing new investment strategies.”

“In particular, ETFs appear to be steadily gaining traction in fixed income — a trend that could reflect investors’ search for better and more efficient approaches to the asset class in a shifting interest-rate environment.”

“Institutions’ heavy usage of passive strategies is helping to drive the growth of ETFs in fixed income,” the study said. “Virtually all the institutional funds and asset managers employ passive strategies in fixed income, and nearly a quarter invest more than half of fixed-income assets in index strategies.”

Interestingly, this is a relatively recent phenomenon. Of the Canadian institutions holding fixed-income ETFs, more than 20 percent said they had started using the vehicles less than two years ago.

Even more popular than fixed-income are equity ETFs, which are employed by the vast majority of Canadian institutional investors. From FP:

Despite this growing penchant for bond funds, equity-related issues remain the most popular ETF investment among institutions, with nearly 80% using the funds in their domestic stock portfolios and 85% employing them to gain U.S. equity exposure.

ETFs are primed to continue their upward trend. According to the study, 40 percent of institutions are planning to increase their allocation to ETFs next year. Only 2 percent of respondents said they plan to reduce allocations.

SEC Charges Kansas With Fraud For Misleading Investors About Health of Pension System

Back in 2009, Kansas was preparing to issue $127 million worth of bonds to investors who probably knew that the state’s pension system wasn’t the healthiest in the country.

What investors didn’t know, however, was just how bad the system really was—it was the 2^nd most underfunded in the nation at the time.

But don’t blame the investors for their ignorance. They didn’t know because Kansas didn’t tell them.

That lack of disclosure is the reason the SEC today announced they are charging Kansas with fraud for misleading investors about the health of the state’s finance and, by extension, the risk associated with buying its bonds.

From Bloomberg:

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Kansas with failing to disclose a “multibillion-dollar” pension liability to bond investors.

“Kansas failed to adequately disclose its multibillion-dollar pension liability in bond offering documents, leaving investors with an incomplete picture of the state’s finances and its ability to repay the bonds amid competing strains on the state budget,” LeeAnn Ghazil Gaunt, chief of the SEC Enforcement Division’s Securities and Public Pension Unit, said in a statement from Washington.

A draft actuarial report provided to Kansas’s public pension found that the gap between its liabilities and assets had grown to $8.3 billion in 2008, from $5.6 billion the previous year, lowering the pension’s funding level to 59 percent, the SEC said.

The gap was the result of years of insufficient contributions by the state and school districts to cover the cost of benefits earned by public employees and their accumulated liabilities, the SEC said.

Only Illinois had a lower pension funding status than Kansas, according to a 2010 report by the Pew Center on the States.

Neither the finance authority nor the Kansas Department of Administration, which advised the authority of material changes to state finances, determined that additional disclosure regarding the pension fund in the bond offering statement was necessary, the SEC said.

The SEC has been investigating this charge for four years.

The SEC also announced today that Kansas has agreed to settle the case without admitting or denying the allegations.

No financial sanctions were imposed on Kansas as a result of the charges.

It’s likely the SEC was content with the settlement due to recent efforts by Kansas to increase the state’s compliance with federal regulations.

In addition, the state has attempted to increase the sustainability of its retirement system—the state boosted contribution rates for workers and employers in 2012, and new hires are now entered into a “cash balance” plan.

Photo by CatDancing via Flickr CC License

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