public pension funds

Do Public Pensions Need Federal Regulation?

The federal law ERISA – the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 – regulates many aspects of private pension plans.

Should public pension funds be beholden to similar federal regulation? Alicia H. Munnell of the Center for Retirement Research explored this issue in a recent column published on MarketWatch.

Munnell writes:

In a recent meeting, an expert very supportive of public-sector employees raised the question of PERISA. These initials are shorthand for federal regulation of state and local pension plans—essentially extending some or all of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), which covers private-sector retirement plans, to the public sector.

I had not thought about such legislation since the early 1980s, and am not sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, proposals these days with regard to federal regulation tend to have a punitive tone—focusing mainly on getting public plans to stop using excessively high discount rates. On the other hand, serious underfunding in some plans is usually the result of delinquent behavior on the part of the sponsor.

So some regulation might be helpful, particularly now that the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) has clarified that its financial reporting standards do not constitute funding policy guidance, leaving a vacuum when it comes to public pension funding policies. But it is not clear that federal legislation could actually include funding requirements.

Munnell explores the origins of ERISA, and the reasons the federal law wound up covering private plans:

Here’s what I remember from the old days. Originally, governmental plans were included along with private plans in the legislative proposals leading up to the passage of ERISA. In the end, Congress exempted public plans from the Act and instead mandated a study of retirement plans at all levels of government to determine: 1) the adequacy of existing levels of participation, vesting, and financing; 2) the effectiveness of existing fiduciary standards; and 3) the necessity for federal legislation. The study concluded that serious problems existed and that federal regulation was necessary.

The experts believed that the federal government had the constitutional authority under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution to regulate reporting, disclosure, and fiduciary standards of state and local plans. On the other hand, the imposition of funding standards might affect the fiscal operations of state and local governments in a way that could threaten the sovereignty of the states. Hence, early legislative efforts omitted any funding regulation.

Some form of public plan legislation was introduced in each of the next four Congresses. While reporting, disclosure, and fiduciary standards may sound dull and routine, the proposed federal regulation met with passionate opposition during its long legislative history in the early 1980s. Opponents claimed that most public plans were under large systems that were generally well managed, and the public sector had not seen the flood of participant complaints witnessed in the private sector. Supporters contended that major reporting and disclosure deficiencies still existed and that the problems would persist since a major conflict of interest often exists between the goals of elected officials and sound financial management. In the absence of adequate reporting and disclosure, public officials could grant generous benefit increases and shift the costs to future taxpayers.

The two sides battled it out for several years but, in the end, no legislation was enacted for the federal regulation of state and local plans. My sense at this point, three decades later, is that federal regulation would be useful given the importance of state and local plans to the economy and the well-being of millions of workers. But the effort to pass such a bill would be worthwhile only if the legislation included funding requirements. And only the lawyers know whether funding requirements could pass constitutional muster.

Read Munnell’s entire piece here.

Chart: Is The Actuarially Required Contribution A “Joke”?

Yesterday, Pioneer Institute Senior Fellow Iliya Atanasov called the annual required contribution (ARC) the “biggest joke of the costing and funding process”. He said in a column at Public Sector Inc:

The biggest joke of the costing and funding process is the so-called annual required contribution (ARC) that the actuarial valuation is supposed to determine. In reality, there is nothing “required” about the ARC – most jurisdictions can contribute absolutely nothing and face no legal repercussions, at least in the short run. And when state and local governments don’t make the ARC, they rarely look at, let alone disclose, the long-term cost of postponing the payment and how much more expensive the benefits become as a result. Just look at Illinois, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, which owe some $300 billion in unfunded liabilities between them, or at the sad condition of once glorious cities like Philadelphia, Chicago and Detroit, teetering towards or already in bankruptcy.

As the above chart shows, the country’s public pension funds are indeed failing to pay 100 percent of their ARCs. Often, states and municipalities make full payments to smaller systems but fail to make consistent, meaningful contributions to larger systems. Another chart for more context:

Chart: The Rise of Hedge Funds In Pension Portfolios

In recent years, hedge funds have solidified themselves as a big part of pension portfolios by two measures:

1) More pension funds than ever are investing in hedge funds

2) Those pensions are allocating more money towards hedge funds than ever before

That bears itself out in the above graphic, and this next one:

A recent Preqin report had this to say about the numbers:

“There are more US public pension funds than ever before allocating capital to hedge funds, and these investors are investing the most they ever have in the asset class. Public pension funds have increasingly recognized the value of hedge funds as part of a diversified portfolio, and although CalPERS’ withdrawal from the asset class will spark some investors to look more closely at their current allocation model, the importance of hedge funds as a source of risk-adjusted returns for these investors is likely to continue to prove attractive for US retirement schemes.

Preqin’s recent research highlights that investors are not using hedge funds to produce outsized returns, but instead to produce uncorrelated, risk-adjusted returns. Over short and longer time frames, hedge funds have in general met investor needs for risk-adjusted returns. However 2014 has been a period of relatively turbulent returns when looking at Preqin’s monthly benchmarks; in times like this, investor calls for changes in fee structures and better alignment of interests become more vocal, and this clearly has had an impact on CalPERS’ decision.”

Chart Credit: Preqin

Dan Primack: All Alternatives Are Not Created Equal

Pension funds have been receiving flak from all sides lately regarding alternative investments.

The criticisms have been varied: the high fees, opacity, underperformance and illiquidity.

But, outside of official statements from pension staff defending their investments, it’s not often we get to here from the people on the other side of the argument.

Dan Primack argues in a column this week that not all alternatives are created equal—and the fight against the asset class has been “oversimplified”.

From Fortune:

Hedge funds are considered to be “alternative investments.” So is private equity. And venture capital. And sometimes so is real estate, timber and certain types of commodities.

A number of public pension systems have increased their exposure to “alternatives” in recent years, at the same time that they either have curtailed (or threatened to curtail) payouts to pensioners. The official line is that the former is to prevent more of the latter, but many critics believe Wall Street is getting rich at the expense of modest retirees.

The complaint, however, generally boils down to this: Alternatives have underperformed the S&P 500 in recent years, even though many alternative funds charge higher fees than would a public equities index fund manager. In other words, state pensions are overpaying for underperformance.

Great bumper sticker. Lousy understanding of investment strategies.

The simple reality is that not all alternatives are created equal. Some, like private equity, are more tightly correlated to public equities than are others. Some are designed to chase public equities in bull markets without collapsing alongside them (that’s where the name “hedge” name from). Real estate is largely its own animal. Same goes for certain oil and gas partnerships.

Lumping all of them together because of fee strategies makes as much sense as arguing that a quarterback should be paid the same as an offensive lineman. After all, they both play football, right?

Primack uses New Jersey as an example:

For those who want to criticize public pensions for investing in alternatives, be specific. New Jersey, for example, reported alternative investment performance of 14.21% for the year ending June 30, 2014. That trailed the S&P 500 for the same period, which came in at 21.38% (or the S&P 1500, which came in at 16.99%). But that alternatives number is a composite of private equity (23.7%), hedge funds (10.2%), real estate (12.74%) and real assets/commodities (6.12%). The sub-asset class most tightly correlated to public equities actually outperformed the S&P 500 (net of fees).

Would New Jersey pensioners have been better off without private equity? Clearly not for that time period. Having avoided real estate or hedge funds, however, would be a different argument. But even that case is tough to prove until New Jersey’s relatively immature alternatives program experiences a bear market. For example, both hedge funds and the S&P 500 went red last month, but the S&P 500’s loss was actually a bit worse. And macro hedge fund managers actually had positive returns. Does that make up for years of the S&P 500 outperforming hedge? Likewise, should real estate performance receive an indirect bump from recent rises in venture capital performance, just because they are both “alternatives?”

Again, that’s a judgment call that should be based on voluminous data, rather than on knee-jerk anger that alternative money managers are getting paid while retiree benefits are getting cut. If alternative managers are helping to stem the severity of those cuts, then everyone wins. If not, then the state pension needs a change in policy. But, in either case, the specific alternative sub-asset classes should be analyzed on their own merits, rather than as one homogeneous bucket. Otherwise, critics may throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Read the entire column here.

Photo by 401kcalculator.org

Pension Funds, Asset Allocation and Bad Habits

All too often, investors can fall victim to recency bias and return chasing.

Pension funds, it turns out, are no exception.

Three researchers – Andrew Ang, Amit Goyal and Antti Ilmanen – analyzed 978 pension funds’ target allocations over a 22-year period to determine whether the funds were chasing returns, and the cost of such chasing.

The paper was published in the most recent issue of Rotman International Journal of Pension Management. An excerpt where the researchers summarize their findings:

Many pension funds rebalance their asset-class allocations regularly to specific target weights, such as the conventional 60% stocks and 40% bonds. But there is anecdotal evidence that funds may let their allocations drift with relative asset-class performance. This may reflect passive buy-and-hold policies, a desire to maintain asset-class allocations near market-cap weights, or more proactive return chasing. We focus on the last possibility.

[…]

Our key findings are easily summarized: pension funds, in the aggregate, do not recognize the shift from momentum to reversal tendencies in asset returns beyond the one-year horizon, and instead the typical pension fund keeps chasing returns over multi-year horizons, to the detriment of the institution’s long-run wealth.

We hope that this evidence will help at least some pension funds to reconsider their asset allocation practices.

Chief Investment Officer magazine further summarizes the paper’s findings:

Corporate and public pension funds alike tended to increase exposure to asset classes with strong returns in both the short and longer term, the paper noted. Even performance three years prior influenced allocation patterns. While the study split out pension funds by size and plan sponsors, they found no statistically significant variance in behavior.

The researchers then turned to a data set provided by AQR, covering global equity, bond, and commodity markets since 1900. Based on more than a century of market activity, the study found momentum patterns on a one-year time horizon. Beyond that, the only statistically significant result showed that two years following a given return, performance was likely to have moved in the opposite direction.

The entire paper, titled Asset Allocation and Bad Habits, can be read here [subscription required].

Photo by Andreas Poike via Flickr CC License

Public Pension Funds Drive Venture Capital Boom, But Performance Is An Issue

The venture capital industry is becoming a major force again, and pension funds are the major driver of the resurgence. From Businessweek:

Public pension funds—the state-run investment pools responsible for the retirement benefits of nearly 20 million Americans—have quietly been funding the recent boom in venture capital. The investment pools are made up of tax dollars and contributions from state employees. For the last few years, they have made up the biggest single source of funds flowing to venture capital, according to the most recent Dow Jones Private Equity Analyst Sources of Capital survey. In 2014, they contributed 20 percent of the sector’s overall haul, down slightly from a 25 percent contribution in 2013.

Indiana’s Public Retirement System allocates (PDF) 1.6 percent ($363 million) to venture capital, which is on the higher end as a percentage of assets; the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) allocates a more typical half percent of assets, although the fund is so big that this meager fraction totaled $1.8 billion in 2013. The amounts are small enough that if pension funds’ entire venture capital investments were to evaporate, pensioners would still be all right. In most states, pension obligations are guaranteed by state constitutions. If the investments—in venture capital or anything else—don’t pay off, taxpayers are on the hook for the shortfall.

But there’s a problem: some of the best venture capital funds don’t want to do business with public pension funds. From Businessweek:

Because public pensions must be transparent about their investments, which are subject to the Freedom of Information Act, many top-performing venture capital funds won’t accept pension money; they don’t want to publicly disclose their portfolios. This makes public pensions pick from other—often lesser-performing—funds.

Like hedge funds and other kinds of private equity, venture capital funds charge an annual management fee of 2 percent, plus 20 percent of profits. Performance is an open question. Many funds fail to perform (PDF) as well as an Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index fund. Diane Mulcahy,senior fellow at the Kaufmann Foundation, has observed that many venture capital funds aren’t profitable and that steady fee income diminishes the funds’ incentive to find profitable investments.

Other institutional investors are funding the VC resurgence, as well. Endowment funds provided the VC industry with 17 percent of its capital in 2014, according to the Dow Jones survey. Corporate pension funds accounted for 7 percent, while union pension funds accounted for 2 percent.

Photo by c_ambler via Flickr CC License

BNY Mellon Launches Service To Aid Pension Funds’ Compliance With New GASB Rules

BNY Mellon has announced a new “regulatory support group” to help its pension fund clients to prepare for and comply with new GASB accounting standards, which went into effect last June. From a BNY Mellon press release:

BNY Mellon has developed reports that will enable plan sponsors to seamlessly compile Statements of Net Assets and Net Changes, new requirements called for under GASB 67. The reports are easily customized and available to clients through Workbench™, BNY Mellon’s technology portal. Additional solutions are designed to help clients meet their GASB 67 performance reporting requirements, with capabilities that feature:

–       Annual money-weighted returns integrated into existing standard and interactive reporting

–       Money-weighted returns available across all return types, including net-of-plan expenses

–       Returns reported by calendar or fiscal periods, as well as customized time periods

–       Extended time-period returns reported on an annualized or cumulative basis back to inception date.

“As new standards like GASB 67 continue to impact plan sponsors, they need investment servicers with a solid understanding of the financial regulatory landscape,” said George Gilmer, BNY Mellon head of Asset Servicing for the Americas.

The new GASB rules are designed to improve transparency and accountability in the financial reporting of public pension funds.

Pension Funds Stay Silent on Corporate Tax Avoidance

Pension funds are no strangers to using their clout to push for changes within the companies they invest in—in the last few years, dozens of funds have called for more sustainable business practices from fossil fuel-oriented companies and advocated new safety guidelines for gun manufacturers.

But on one issue, public pension funds are remaining silent. The issue: corporate tax avoidance. As reported by the New York Times:

In the outcry about the recent merger mania to take advantage of the tax avoidance transactions known as inversions, certain key players have been notably silent: public pension funds.

Many of the nation’s largest public pension funds — managing trillions of dollars on behalf of police and fire departments, teachers and others — have major stakes in American companies that are seeking to renounce their corporate citizenship in order to lower their tax bill.

While politicians have criticized these types of deals — President Obama has called them “wrong” and he is examining ways to end the practice — public pension funds don’t appear to be using their influence as major shareholders to encourage corporations to stay put.

Tax avoidance made headlines again last week when Burger King announced it was buying Tim Horton’s, a move which would make Burger King a “citizen” of Canada for tax purposes.

Pension funds didn’t speak up. But why? The NY Times speculates that investment performance has a lot to do with it:

Public pension funds may be so meek on the issue of inversions because they are conflicted. On one side, the funds say they care about the long term and the implications for their state. Calpers’s “Investment Beliefs” policy states that the pension system should “consider the impact of its actions on future generations of members and taxpayers,” yet most pension funds are underfunded and, frankly, desperate to show investment returns. Mergers for tax inversion can prop up share prices of the acquirers and clearly help pension funds, at least in the short term, show improved performance.

CalPERS is usually one of the first funds to use “activist investing” tactics to push for changes in the companies they invest in. But the fund has remained unusually quiet. The fund talked to the NY Times and gave an explanation:

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the nation’s largest public pension fund and typically one of the most vocal, has remained silent.

“We don’t have a view on this from an investor standpoint — we’re globally invested, as you know, and appreciate that tax reform is a government role,” Anne Simpson, Calpers’s senior portfolio manager and director of global governance, told me. “We do expect companies to act with integrity, whatever the issue at hand — that goes without saying. We also want to see a focus on the long term.”

When I pressed for more, her spokesman wrote to me, “We’re going to have to take a pass on this one.”

Mark Cuban recently stated that he would sell the stock of any company that moved out of the United States to avoid taxes.

Photo by TaxRebate.org.uk