management fees | Pension360

Newspaper: Kentucky Pension System is Public Business

Pension360 covered the push last week by several Kentucky lawmakers to make the state’s pension system more transparent.

But at least one lawmaker wasn’t on board with those plans. House State Government Committee Chairman Brent Yonts had this to say about his colleagues’ proposals, which included public disclosure of pension benefits, management fees, and other data:

“Frankly, I don’t think that’s the public’s business,” Yonts said. “They have access to the public payroll and salary information. They can theorize about what we’re going to collect in pensions. But the public is not entitled to know every last little thing about us.”

The Lexington-Herald Leader editorial board weighed in on the issue on Wednesday. The newspaper’s stance: public pensions should be public business. From the editorial:

Rep. Brent Yonts, D-Greenville, is certainly right that the public “is not entitled to know every little thing about us.”

We don’t need to know Yonts’ blood pressure or where he gets his hair done, or which, if any, bourbon he likes to sip of an evening.

But taxpayers are entitled to know how much he and every other state employee will receive from our public pension systems.

Yonts, chairman of the House State Government Committee, made his “every little thing” remark while explaining his opposition to two bills — prefiled for the upcoming session — that would increase transparency in the beleaguered public retirement systems.

Specifically, Yonts thinks the public just doesn’t have the right to know how much retirees are drawing in public pension benefits.

“Frankly, I don’t think that’s the public’s business,” he told reporter John Cheves.

It is all the public’s business: How much people draw and how much the retirement systems pay hedge fund managers and other investment advisers.

Right now the largest of these funds, the Kentucky Employees Retirement System, which covers workers in non-hazardous jobs, is at a perilous 21-percent funding level. That means it has only about one in five of the dollars it is obligated to pay out.

This has happened for several reasons, undoubtedly the most important being that governors and the General Assembly have balanced too many budgets by forgoing the state’s annual match to the money paid in by employees. That’s a breach of promise and an unconscionable slap at state workers.

[…]

And, then there’s the $55 million that the retirement systems paid to investment managers with very little disclosure about what we got for that money.

It’s impossible to fix Kentucky’s public pension mess without laying all the cards on the table. How much do the spikers, double-dippers and well-retired lawmakers cost the system? No one knows, or if they do they’re not telling. How are the investment advisers’ fees set and what do we get for them?

Yonts and public employees who say retirement benefits are none of our business should get over it.

Employees are absolutely right that they took jobs and paid into the retirement system on the belief the money would be there.

But taxpayers funded those salaries and will pay the lion’s share of the bill to solve the pension mess. They have the right to know every little thing.

The full editorial can be read here.

Naked Capitalism Publishes Ten More Private Equity Limited Partnership Agreements

The Naked Capitalism blog has been given ten private equity limited partnership agreements from “a source authorized to receive them who is not bound by a confidentiality agreement.”

Pension funds sign limited partnership agreements when they do business with private equity firms. Observers are typically very interested in seeing the documents because they are usually kept under lock-and-key, as PE firms claim the documents contain “trade secrets” that would harm business if made public.

The agreements received by Naked Capitalism can be read here.

Here’s an excerpt of the Naked Capitalism post accompanying the release of the documents:

__________________

By Yves Smith

There is a vital public interest in having this information in the open. Public pension funds, which are government bodies, are the biggest single group of investors in private equity, representing roughly 25% of total industry assets. Yet private equity limited partnership agreements are the only contracts at the state and local government level that are systematically shielded from public scrutiny, through state legislation or favorable state attorney opinions.

Yet in countries less captured by rampant free market ideology and private equity political donations, a revolt is underway against this secrecy regime. As the Financial Times reported:

Anger has erupted over the practice of asset managers coercing pension funds into signing non-disclosure agreements. Pension schemes argue it is uncompetitive and prevents them from securing the best deals for their members.

The imposition of confidentiality agreements means pension funds are not able to compare how much they are being charged by fund managers, potentially exposing them and their scheme members to unnecessarily high fees.

The practice is of particular concern with respect to public sector pension plans, which are effectively funded by the taxpayer.

David Blake, director of the Pensions Institute at Cass Business School in London, said: “Local authorities are not allowed to compare fee deals, and that is an outrage. It should be made illegal that fund managers demand an investment mandate is confidential.”

How do private equity kingpins justify their extreme demands for confidentiality, their assertion that limited partnership agreements in their entirety are trade secrets? Consider this “we’ll fight them on the beaches” argument from this Monday’s Private Fund Management, that if general partners, meaning the private equity funds, are forced to divulge fees, they’ll eventually have to expose more of the limited partnership agreement. And of course they claim that would do them competitive harm:

It’s impossible to have a debate about public pension plans disclosing their fee payments without first acknowledging why GPs want them kept private in the first place…

In this context, GPs are being portrayed as secretive and heavy-handed. But so far, what hasn’t been addressed properly is why GPs are apparently so keen to prevent fee receipts from entering the public domain in the first place.

Speaking to pfm off the record, no manager has ever told us that they consider management fees a vital trade secret. No one has defended the idea that disclosing them can make or break a firm.

What we are hearing instead is that GPs perceive the fee debate as a proxy battle for disclosing other data that really are sensitive to the firm’s ability to do business, such as the finer points of their investment strategies, key man clauses and the like. All these things are documented in the LPA, and if the LPA can no longer be subjected to non-disclosure, then sooner or later demands will be made to publish other types of fund-specific information also.

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The full post can be read here.

Survey: 81 Percent of Pension Funds Looking to Bring More Investment Management In-House

CalSTRS recently announced its plans to eventually manage 60 percent of its assets internally. According to a recent survey, a majority of pension funds are beginning to think the same way.

A survey by State Street released this week found that 81 percent of pension funds are planning to bring more investment management duties in-house in the near future.

From BenefitsPro:

81 percent of funds are exploring bringing more management responsibilities in-house over the next three years.

Cost concerns are driving the trend, as 29 percent of funds said it is becoming more difficult to justify the fees paid to outside managers.

“Pension funds’ desire to deliver strong investment returns to their participants coupled with improved oversight and governance is leading to a need for more in-house accountability for asset and risk management,” said Martin Sullivan, head of asset owner sector solutions for North America.

The State Street data doesn’t suggest that outside management will become obsolete, but rather that pension funds are becoming more judicious about how they select and manage outside relationships.

The largest funds have the capacity to handle multi-asset management in-house, but they are in the minority, Sullivan noted.

“The majority of pension funds will need to make a choice about where to be a specialist and when a sub-contractor is needed,” he said.

The survey examined responses from 134 defined benefit and defined contribution funds around the globe.

The survey also found funds are willing to take on more risk:

While pensions funds re-examine their relationships with outside managers, 77 percent are also reporting a need to increase their risk appetite to boost lackluster returns.

That means a greater push into alternatives, as equities and fixed-income “may look pricey.”

“Pension funds are finding that a small allocation to alternatives is not sufficient to generate the required growth. This is forcing many of them to place bigger bets on alternatives,” according to the report.

The full report, called “Pension Funds DIY: A Hands-On Future for Asset Owners,” can be found here.

CalPERS Board Asks Private Equity Consultants: Are “Investors Having Their Pockets Picked” By Evergreen Fees?

http://youtu.be/gn7XSqZZanU

Over at Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith has posted an extensive analysis of the October 13^th meeting of CalPERS’ investment committee.

At the meeting, the committee heard presentations from three consultants: Albourne America, Meketa Investment Group, Pension Consulting Alliance.

The meeting gets interesting when one committee member asks the consultants about “evergreen fees”.

[The exchange begins at the 34:30 mark in the above video].

From Naked Capitalism:

The board is presented with three candidates screened by CalPERS staff. Two, Meketa Investment Group and Pension Consulting Alliance, are established CalPERS advisors. There’s one newbie candidate, Albourne America. Each contender makes a presentation and then the board gets a grand total of 20 minutes for questions and answers for each of them. This isn’t a format for getting serious.

To make a bad situation worse, most of the questions were at best softballs. For instance, Dana Hollinger asked what the consultants thought about the level of risk CalPERS was taking in private equity program. Priya Mathur asked if the advisors could do an adequate job evaluating foreign managers with no foreign offices. Michael Bilbrey asked how the consultants kept from overreacting to positive or negative market conditions.

One board member, however, did manage to put the consultants on the spot. The answers were revealing, and not in a good way. The question came from J.J. Jelincic, where he asks about a particular type of abusive fee, an evergreen fee.

Evergreen fees occur when the general partner makes its portfolio companies, who are in no position to say no, sign consulting agreements that require the companies to pay fees to the general partners. It’s bad enough that those consulting fees, which in industry parlance are called monitoring fees, seldom bear any resemblance to services actually rendered. Over the years, limited partners have wised up a bit and now require a big portion of those fees, typically 80%, to be rebated against the management fees charged by the general partners.

So where do these evergreen fees come in? Gretchen Morgenson flagged an example of this practice in a May article. The general partner makes the hapless portfolio company sign a consulting agreement, say for ten or twelve years. The company is sold out of the fund before that. But the fees continue to be paid to the general partner after the exit. Clearly, the purchase price, and hence the proceeds to the fund, will have been reduced by the amount of those ongoing fees, to the detriment of the fund’s investors. And with the company no longer in the fund, it is almost certain to be no longer subject to the fee rebates to the limited partners.

[…]

Jelincic describes the how the response said that the fees are shared only if the fund has not fully exited its investment in the portfolio company. Jelincic asks if that’s an example of an evergreen fee, and if so, what CalPERS should do about it.

Naked Capitalism on the consultants’ responses:

The response from Albourne is superficially the best, but substantively is actually the most troubling. The first consultant responds enthusiastically, stating that CalPERS is in position to stop this sort of practice by virtue of having a “big stick” as the SEC does. He says that other funds aren’t able to contest these practices.

The disturbing part is where he claims his firm was aware of these practices years ago by virtue of doing what they call back office audits. That sounds implausible, since the rights of the limited partners to examine books and records extends only to the fund itself not to the general partner or the portfolio companies (mind you, some smaller or newer funds might consent). But the flow of the fees and expenses that the limited partners don’t know about go directly from the portfolio company to the general partner and do not pass through the fund. How does Albourne have any right to see that?

But if they somehow really did have that information, the implication is even worse. It means they were complicit in the general partners’ abuses. If they really did know this sort of thing and remained silent, whose interest were they serving? It looks as if they violated their fiduciary duty to their clients.

The younger Albourne staffer claimed a lot of the fees were disclosed in footnotes and that most limited partners have been too thinly staffed or inattentive to catch them. That amounts to a defense of the general partners and if Albourne really did know about these fees, Albourne’s inaction.

However, The SEC doesn’t agree with that view and they have the right to do much deeper probes than Albourne does. From SEC exam chief Drew Bowden’s May speech:

[A]dvisers bill their funds separately for various back-office functions that have traditionally been included as a service provided in exchange for the management fee, including compliance, legal, and accounting — without proper disclosure that these costs are being shifted to investors.

For these fees to be properly disclosed, they had to have been set forth in the limited partnership agreement or the subscription docs for the limited partners, meaning before the investment was made, to have gotten proper notice. Go look at any of the dozen limited partnership agreements we have published. You don’t see footnotes, much the less other nitty gritty disclosure of exactly who pays for what. Not very clear disclosures after the limited partners are committed to the funds, to the extent some general partners provide them, do not constitute proper notice and consent.

Meketa was clearly not prepared to field Jelincic’s question and waffled. They effectively said they thought the fees were generally permissible but more transparency was needed. They threw it back on CalPERS to be more aggressive, particularly on customized accounts, and urged them work with other large limited partners.

Pension Consulting Alliance was a tad less deer-in-the-headlights than Meketa but in terms of substance, like Albourne, made some damning remarks. The consultant acted if evergreen fees might be offset, which simply suggests he is ignorant of the nature of this ruse. He said general partners are looking to do something about it, implying they were intending to get rid of them, but said compliance was inconsistent. Huh? If the funds intend to stop the practice, why is compliance an issue? This is simply incoherent, unless you recognize that what he is actually describing is unresolved wrangling, not any sort of agreement between limited and general partners that charge these fees on this matter. He also said he would recommend against being in funds that have evergreen fees. But there was no evidence he had planned to be inquisitive about them before the question was asked.

You’ll notice that all of the answers treat the only outcome as having CalPERS, perhaps in concert with other investors, be more bloody-minded about evergreen and other dubious fees. You’ll notice no one said, “Yes, you should tell the SEC this stinks. You were duped. You should encourage the SEC to fine general partners who engaged in this practice and encourage the SEC to have those fees disgorged. That would to put an end to this. Better yet, tell the general partners you’ll do that if they don’t stop charging those fees and make restitution to you. That’s the fastest way to put a stop to this and get the most for your beneficiaries.” Two of the three respondents said CalPERS is in a position to play hardball, so why not take that point of view to its logical conclusion?

But this is what passes for best-of-breed due diligence and supervision in public pension land. Imagine what goes on at, say, a municipal pension fund.

Read the entire Naked Capitalism post, which features more analysis, here.

New Jersey Anti-Pay-To-Play Bill Passes Senate

The New Jersey Senate on Thursday approved a recently introduced piece of legislation that would tighten rules regarding political donations made by investment firms vying for business from the state’s pension funds.

The bill, called S-2430, passed by a vote of 25–8.

What Does CalPERS’ Hedge Fund Pullout Mean For the “Average” Investor?

Larry Zimpleman, chairman and president of Principal Financial Group, has written a short piece in the Wall Street Journal today detailing his reaction to CalPERS cutting hedge funds out of their portfolio and what the move means for the average investor.

From the WSJ:

I was very interested (and a bit surprised) to read about the decision of Calpers (the California Public Retirement System) to move completely out of hedge funds for their $300 billion portfolio.

While I haven’t visited directly with anyone at Calpers about the reasons for their decision, from the stories I’ve read, it seems to be a combination of two things. First, it’s not clear that hedge-fund returns overall are any better than a well-diversified portfolio (although the management fees of hedge funds are much higher). Second, hedge funds had only about a 1% allocation in the overall portfolio. So even if they did provide a superior return, it would have a negligible impact on overall performance.

What’s the takeaway for the average investor? First, if you have “alternatives” (like hedge funds) in your own portfolio, they need to be a meaningful percentage of your portfolio (something like a 5% minimum). Second, take a hard look at the recent performance against the management fees and think about that net return as compared to a well-diversified stock and bond portfolio. Hedge funds are, as their name implies, set up more for absolute performance and outperformance during stressed times. If you’re a long-term investor that believes in diversification and can tolerate volatility, hedge funds may be expensive relative to the value they provide, given your long-term outlook.

Principal Financial Group is one of the largest investment firms in the world and also sells retirement products.

Zimpleman’s post was part of the WSJ’s “The Expert” series, where industry leaders give their thoughts on a topic on their choice.

San Francisco Pension Fund Votes Today On Whether To Invest in Hedge Funds

San Francisco Employees’ Retirement System (SFERS) will vote later today on whether to invest in hedge funds for the first time.

If the board votes “yes”, the fund will have the ability to allocate up to 15 percent of its assets toward hedge funds. Reported by Bloomberg:

The hedge fund proposal stems from a June meeting when staff recommended changes to the fund’s asset allocation and the board voted to take 90 days to study options. At a meeting last month, staff suggested shifting the allocation to invest 35 percent in global equity, 18 percent in private equity, 17 percent in real assets, 15 percent in fixed income and 15 percent in hedge funds, according to the [fund CIO] Coaker memo.

The retirement system administers a pension plan and a deferred-compensation plan for active and retired employees. Retirement members include those who had worked for the City and County of San Francisco, the San Francisco Unified School District, the San Francisco Community College District and the San Francisco Trial Courts.

Herb Meiberger, a commissioner and retirement board member, last month called for keeping hedge funds out of the mix. Hedge funds are complex, difficult to understand and carry high management fees, he said in a September memo.

“SFERS is a public fund subject to public scrutiny,” Meiberger wrote in the memo. It’s “one of the best-funded plans in the United States. Why change course?”

[…]

The San Francisco fund had $17 billion in assets based on market value and an unfunded liability of 15.9 percent as of July 1, 2013, a decline from 21.1 percent a year earlier, according to its most recent actuarial valuation report.

The chief investment officer of SFERS, William Coaker, recommended approving hedge funds in a memo this month.

“They have provided good protection in market downturns,” he wrote.

CalPERS May Be Done With Hedge Funds, But It’s Far From Finished With Fees

There’s been a torrent of media coverage about how CalPERS, with its decision to kick hedge funds to the curb, has also distanced itself from high-fee investment managers.

But nearly $500 million of private equity fees say otherwise, writes the New York Times’ Josh Barro:

Here’s the thing: Calpers, America’s largest public employee pension system, with $300 billion in assets under management, isn’t getting away from investment gurus altogether.

The system’s $4 billion hedge fund program is small potatoes; its main exposure to high-fee gurus is through $31 billion in private equity funds, which just like hedge funds rely on the premise that highly paid fund managers can beat the market through special insight and talent.

Calpers paid $476 million in management fees on its private equity portfolio in the fiscal year ending June 2013, equal to 1.4 percent of private equity assets, about 20 times what it would have cost Calpers to invest a similar amount in stocks and bonds. And Calpers’s commitment to private equity remains strong, guru-driven fees and all.

Ted Eliopoulos, the interim chief investment officer at Calpers, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, made clear in a statement that the choice to exit hedge funds was specific to the asset class. He criticized hedge funds’ “complexity, cost and the lack of ability to scale at Calpers’s size.” The key word there is “scale”: Even at $4 billion, hedge funds made up just over 1 percent of the Calpers portfolio. That wasn’t enough to make a meaningful difference to the fund’s returns or diversification, and the system didn’t see good opportunities to scale up.

As of 2013, CalPERS invested 10.4 percent of its portfolio in private equity. That’s a big jump from its 6 percent PE allocation in 2006.

But, according to Josh Barro, CalPERS cut its target private equity allocation twice this year—the target allocation at the beginning of 2014 was 14 percent. Now, two downward revisions later, PE’s target allocation sits at 10 percent.

Photo by 401kcalculator.org

Video: Hedge Fund Manager On “Tweaking” Fee Structure

The video above features John Paulson, founder of $22 billion hedge-fund firm Paulson & Co., talking about the fee structure of hedge funds and whether he feels “pressure” to change that structure to appease fee-averse investors.

“Institutions are becoming a little more demanding…they are putting pressure on the management fee and the incentive fee,” Paulson says during the video.

The footage was taken during a panel discussion at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

Video courtesy of the Wall Street Journal.

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.

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