Leo Kolivakis | Pension360

Pension Pulse: Caisse’s High-Speed Push Into Infrastructure

Last week, Canada’s Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec acquired a 30 percent stake in Eurostar International, a high-speed rail service that runs between London, Paris and Brussels.

The deal came just months after Caisse partnered with Quebec’s government to take over some of the province’s major infrastructure projects.

Leo Kolivakis of Pension Pulse dove deeper into the Eurostar deal in a post on Wednesday. It is re-printed below.

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By Leo Kolivakis, Pension Pulse

This is a huge deal for the Caisse, which is increasingly shifting its focus on domestic and international infrastructure. It signed a deal with Quebec’s government to develop some of the province’s future infrastructure projects and is now going after prize assets in other developed markets.

But unlike the Quebec project, which is essentially a greenfield project full of critics, the Eurostar International is a mature and coveted infrastructure asset that is profitable and can offer the Caisse and Hermes Investment Management steady cash flows over the next decades, if the deal passes regulatory approval and isn’t nixed by the majority shareholders.

And that’s where things get tricky. Canada’s mighty pensions already own a huge chunk of Britain and there will be fierce opposition to this deal. This is a strategic infrastructure asset with important economic and security concerns. It’s not just any old boring infrastructure asset, it’s a real prize, one of the most recognizable infrastructure assets in the world.

Also, if for any reason the British and European economy stumbles and the dark forces of nationalism rear their ugly head, there could be problems down the road. Just look at what’s going on in Greece with this new leftist government threatening to nationalize key infrastructure assets.

Still, this is a great deal for the Caisse even once you factor in all the economic uncertainty and regulatory risks. If Europe is able to finally turn the corner, which seems to be the case but with lingering risks, then this will really be a great deal for the Caisse. Even if Europe stagnates, people are still going to use high-speed trains to travel within Europe and tourism will boom, adding to the profits of this asset.

As far as pricing, I can’t tell you if the Caisse overpaid but I will take Macky Tall’s word that they didn’t. Keep in mind, these are ultra long-term assets which pay steady cash flows, which is what the Caisse and other large Canadian pensions are increasingly looking for to match their long-dated liabilities. And by going direct, they avoid paying fees to third parties.

Photo by Renaud CHODKOWSKI via Flickr CC License

Pension Pulse: Diving Deeper Into Caisse’s Big 2014

The median U.S. public pension fund returned 6.8 percent in 2014.

But north of the border, one of Canada’s largest public funds blew that figure away.

Caisse de depot et Placement du Quebec, Canada’s second-largest pension fund, posted investment returns of 12 percent in 2014, nearly doubling the returns of its U.S. peers.

Over at Pension Pulse, Leo Kolivakis dives deep into Caisse’s 2014 results. What did he find? The post is re-printed below.

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By Leo Kolivakis, Pension Pulse

You can gain more insights on the Caisse’s 2014 results by going directly on their website here. In particular, the Caisse provides fact sheets on the following broad asset classes:

Keep in mind that unlike other major Canadian pension funds, the Caisse has a dual mandate to promote economic activity in Quebec as well as maximizing returns for its depositors.

In fact, the recent deal to handle Quebec’s infrastructure needs is part of this dual mandate. Some have criticized the deal, questioning whether the Caisse can make money on public transit, but this very well might be a model they can export elsewhere, especially in the United States where CBS 60 Minutes reports infrastructure is falling apart.

Whether or not the Caisse will be successful in exporting this infrastructure model to the United States remains to be seen but if you follow the wise advice of Nobel laureate Michael Spence on why the world needs better public investments, public pensions investing in infrastructure could very well be the answer to a growing and disturbing jobs crisis plaguing the developed world.

As far as the overall results, they were definitely solid, with all portfolios contributing to the overall net investment of $23.77 billion (click on image below):

Of course, what really matters is value-added over benchmarks. After all, this is why we pay Canadian pension fund managers big bucks (some a lot more than others).

In fact, in its press release, the Caisse states in no uncertain terms:

“[its] investment strategy centers on an absolute return approach in which investment portfolios are built on strong convictions, irrespective of benchmark indices. These indices are only used ex post, to measure the portfolios’ performance. The approach is based on active management and rigorous, fundamental analysis of potential investments.”

I’ve already discussed life after benchmarks at the Caisse. So how did their active management stack up? For the overall portfolio, the 12% return edged out the fund’s benchmark which delivered an 11.4% gain, adding 60 basis points of value-added last year (do not know the four year figure).

Below, I provide you with the highlights of the three main broad asset classes with a breakdown of individual portfolios (click on each image to read the highlights):

Fixed Income:

Inflation-Sensitive:

Equities:

Some quick points to consider just looking at these highlights:

Declining rates helped the Fixed Income group generate strong returns in 2014 but clearly the value-added is waning. In 2014, Fixed Income returned 8.4%, 10 basis points under its benchmark which gained 8.5%. Over the past four years, the results are better, with Fixed Income gaining 5.6%, 70 basis points over its benchmark which gained 4.9%. Real estate debt was the best performing portfolio in Fixed Income over the last year and four years but on a dollar basis, its not significant enough to add to the overall gains in Fixed Income.
There were solid gains in Inflation-Sensitive assets but notice that both Real Estate and Infrastructure underperformed their respective benchmarks in 2014 and the last four years, which means there was no value-added from these asset classes. The returns of Infrastructure are particularly bad relative to its benchmark but in my opinion, this reflects a problem with the benchmark of Infrastructure as there is way too much beta and perhaps too high of an additional spread to reflect the illiquid nature and leverage used in these assets. More details on the Caisse’s benchmarks are available on page 20 of the 2013 Annual Report (the 2014 Annual Report will be available in April).
In Equities, Private Equity also slightly underperformed its benchmark over the last year and last four years, but again this reflects strong gains in public equities and perhaps the spread to adjust for leverage and illiquidity. U.S Equity led the gains in Equities in 2014 but the Caisse indexes this portfolio (following the 2008 crisis) so there was no value-added there, it’s strictly beta. However, there were strong gains in the Global Quality Equity as well as Canadian Equity portfolios relative to their benchmarks in 2014 and over the last four years, contributing to the overall value-added.

If you read this, you might be confused. The Caisse’s strategy is to shift more of its assets into real estate, private equity and infrastructure and yet there is no value-added there, which is troubling if you just read the headline figures without digging deeper into what makes up the benchmarks of these private market asset classes.

The irony, of course, is that the Caisse is increasingly shifting assets in private markets but most of the value-added over its benchmarks is coming from public markets, especially public equities.

But this is to be expected when stock markets are surging higher. And as a friend of mine reminded me: “It about time they produced value-added in Public Equities. For years, they were underperforming and so they came up with this Global Quality Equity portfolio to create value.”

Also, keep in mind private markets are generating solid returns and as I recently noted in my comment on why Canadian pensions are snapping up real estate:

… in my opinion the Caisse’s real estate division, Ivanhoé Cambridge, is by far the best real estate investment management outfit in Canada. There are excellent teams elsewhere too, like PSP Investments, but Ivanhoe has done a tremendous job investing directly in real estate and they have been very selective, even in the United States where they really scrutinize their deals carefully and aren’t shy of walking away if the deal is too pricey.

There is something else, the Caisse’s strategy might pay off when we hit a real bear market and pubic equities tank. Maybe that’s why they’re not too concerned about all the beta and high spread to adjust for leverage and illiquidity in these private market benchmarks.

But there are skeptics out there. One of them is Dominic Clermont, formerly of Clermont Alpha, who sent me a study he did 2 years ago showing the Caisse’s alpha was negative between 1998 and 2012. Dominic hasn’t updated that study (he told me he will) but he shared this:

I had done a study two years ago that showed that the Caisse’s alpha was close to -1% and close to statistically significantly different from zero and negative. Part of that regular value lost is compensated by taking a lot more risk than its benchmark by being levered. That leverage means doing better than the benchmark when the markets do perform well, and being in a crisis when the market tanks…

I asked him to clarify this statement and noted something a pension fund manager shared with me in my post on the highest paid pension fund CEOs:

Also, it’s not easy comparing payouts among Canada’s large DB plans. Why? One senior portfolio manager shared this with me:

“First and foremost, various funds use more leverage than others. This is the most differentiating factor in explaining performance across DB plans. In Canada, F/X policy will also impact performance of past 3 years. ‎It’s very hard to compare returns because of vastly different invest policies; case in point is PSP’s huge equity weighting (need to include all real estate, private equity and infrastructure) that has a huge beta.”

Dominic came back to me with some additional thoughts:

I would love to do proper performance attribution, but I had limited access to data. But we can infer a lot with published data. We do have historical performance for all major funds like the Caisse, CPP, Teachers, PSP, etc. in their financial statements. They also publish the performance of their benchmark.

I agree that because of different investment policies, it is difficult to compare one plan to the next. But we can compare any plan to itself, i.e. its benchmark.

Again, I like to do proper performance attribution in a multivariate framework and that is one area of expertise to me. To do it on a huge plan like the Caisse would require a lot of data which I do not have access to. But a simple CAPM type of attribution would give some insight. In this case, the benchmark is not an equity market as in the base case of CAPM, but the strategy mix of the Caisse.

Thus if we regress the returns (or the excess returns over risk free rate) of a plan, over its benchmark return (or excess over RF rate), we would obtain a Beta of the regression to be close to one if the plan is properly managed with proper risk controls. That is what I obtain when I do this exercise with the returns of a well-known plan – well known for its quality of management, and its constant outperformance.

When I do this for the Caisse, I get a Beta of the regression significantly greater than 1 – close to 1.25. It looks like the leverage of the Caisse over the 15 years of the regression was on average close to 25% above its benchmark! Now part of that as you mentioned and as I explain in my study could come from:

Investment in high Beta stocks,

Investment in levered Private equity

Investment in levered Real Estate and Infrastructure

Investment in longer duration bonds

Leveraging the balance sheet of the plan: Check Graphic 1 on the link: http://www.clermontalpha.com/cdpq_15ans.htm

It shows the leverage of the Caisse going from 18% in 1998 to 36% in 2008! So my average of 25% excess Beta is in line with this documented leverage.

The chart also shows Ontario Teachers’ and OMERS’ leverage. The difference is that Teachers’ leverage is IN its benchmark, while the Caisse is NOT. Thus the Caisse is taking 25% more risk than its clients’ policy mix! You would think that all these clients risk monitoring would be complaining… They are not.

Of course, that leverage is good when markets return positively and you can see that on the colored chart. But that leverage is terrible when the markets drop 2008, 2002, 2001. When that happen, it is time to fire the management, restart with a new one and blame the previous management for the big loss. Some of those big losses were also exaggerated by forced liquidation accounting (we all remember the ABCP $6 billion loss reserve which was almost fully recovered in the following years inflating the returns under the new administration).

By not doing proper attribution, we are not aware of the continuous loss (negative alpha) hidden by the excess returns not obtained by skilled alpha, but by higher risk through leverage. The risk-adjusted remains negative… And we are not focusing our energies into building an alpha generating organisation with optimal risk budgeting. Why bother, the leverage will give us the extra returns! But that is not true alpha, not true value added.

Which brings me to the alpha of the regression. I told you that this other great institution which does proper risk controls, gets a Beta close to one. They also get a positive alpha of the regression which is statistically significant (t stat close to 2). Not surprising, they master the risk budgeting exercise, and they understand risk controls.

For the Caisse, the Alpha of the regression is close to -1% per year and it is statistically significant. Nobody in the private market could sustain such long period of negative alpha. Nobody could manage a portfolio with 25% more risk than what is requested by the client.

In my report, I also talk about the QPP contribution rate. When Canada created the CPP in the mid-60s, Quebec said “Hey, we want to better manage our own fund.” That led to the creation of the Caisse de Depot and it was an excellent decision as the returns of the QPP were much better because they were managed professionally in a diversified portfolio (vs provincial bonds for the CPP). Unnoticed by everyone in Quebec, the contribution rate started to increase in 2012 and will continue to increase up until 2017 at which time Quebecers will pay 9% more than the rest of Canadians for basically the same pension plan (some tiny differences). And the explanation is this negative alpha.

I also explained that with proper risk budgeting techniques at all levels, the Caisse could deliver an extra $5 billion with 20% less risk! Instead of increasing the contribution rate of all CDPQ clients QPP, REGOP, etc., we could have kept them at the same level or lower. And part of that extra $5B return every year would find its way into the Quebec government coffer through reduced contributions and higher taxes (the higher contributions to QPP, Regop, etc. that Quebecers pay are tax deductible…)

For how long are we going to avoid looking at proper attribution? For how long are we going to forfeit this extra $5B per year in extra returns?

I shared Dominic’s study with Roland Lescure, the CIO of the Caisse, who shared this with me:

You are right, we have significantly lowered leverage at the Caisse since 2009. Leverage is now solely used to fund part of our real estate portfolio and the (in)famous ABCP portfolio which will be gone by 2016. As you rightly point out, most Canadian pension funds use leverage to different degrees. Further, we also have significantly reduced risk by focusing our investments on quality companies and projects, which are less risky than the usual benchmark-driven investments. And those investments happen to have served us well as they did outperform the benchmarks significantly in 2014. You probably have all the details for each of our portfolios but I would point out that our Canadian equity portfolio outperformed the TSX by close to 300 bps. And the global quality equity portfolio did even better.

I thank Dominic Clermont and Roland Lescure for sharing their insights. Dominic raises several excellent points, some of which are politically sensitive and to be honest, hard to verify without experts really digging into the results of each and every large Canadian pension. Also, that increase in the contribution rate for public sector workers is part of tackling Quebec’s pension deficits, slowly introducing more risk-sharing in these plans.

Again, this is why even though I’m against an omnipotent regulator looking at systemic risks at pensions, I believe all of Canada’s large pensions need to provide details of their public and private investments to the Bank of Canada and we need to introduce uniform comprehensive performance, operational and risk audits at all of Canada’s major pensions.

These audits need to be conducted by independent and qualified third parties that are properly staffed to conduct them. The current auditing by agencies such as the Auditor General of Canada is simply too flimsy as far as I’m concerned, which is why we need better, more comprehensive audits across the board and the findings should be made public for all of Canada’s large pensions.

And let me say while the Caisse has clearly reduced leverage since the ABCP scandal which the media keeps covering up, it is increasingly shifting into private markets, introducing more illiquidity risk that can come back to haunt them if global deflation takes hold.

As far as stocks are concerned, I see a melt-up occurring in tech and biotech even if the Fed makes a monumental mistake and raises rates this year (read the latest comment by Sober Look to understand why market expectations of Fed rate hikes are unrealistic). It will be a rough and tumble year but my advice to the Caisse is to stay long U.S. equities (especially small caps) and start nibbling at European equities like Warren Buffett. And stick a fork in Canadian equities, they’re cooked!

Will the liquidity and share buyback party end one day? You bet it will but that is a topic for another day where I will introduce you to a very sharp emerging manager and his team working on an amazing and truly unique tail risk strategy.

As far as U.S. equities, I think the Caisse needs to stop indexing and start looking at ways to take opportunistic large bets using some of the information I discussed when I covered top funds’ Q4 activity. This would be above and beyond the information they receive from their external fund managers.

By the way, if you compare the Caisse’s top holdings to those of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, you’ll notice they are both long shares of Waste Management (WM), one of the top-performing stocks in the S&P 500 over the last year.

I’ll share another interesting fact with you, something CNBC’s Dominic Chu discussed a few days ago. Five stocks — Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), Biogen Idec (BIIB), Gilead (GILD), and Netflix (NFLX) — account for all of the gains in the Nasdaq this year. If that’s not herd behavior, I don’t know what is!!

Lastly, it takes a lot of time to write these in-depth comments and you won’t read this stuff in traditional media outlets which get hung up on headline figures and hardly ever dig deeper. Please take the time to contribute to my blog on the top right-hand side, or better yet, stop discriminating against me and hire the best damn pension and investment analyst in the world who just happens to live in la belle province!

Below, Michael Sabia, CEO of the Caisse, discusses the Caisse’s 2014 results with TVA’s Pierre Bruneau (in French). Michael also appeared on RDI Économie last night where he was interviewed by Gérald Filion. You can view that interview here and you can read Filion’s blog comment here (in French).

Also, some food for thought for the Caisse’s real estate team. A new report from Zillow shows that rents across the U.S. are increasing, and not just in the expected regions of New York City, San Francisco and Boston. Overall, rents increased 3.3% year-over-year as of January. But many cities outpaced that, including Kansas City, which saw rent grow more than double the national average, jumping 8.5% year-over-year. St. Louis saw rent increase by 4.5% over the same period. Rents in Detroit grew by 5.0% and rents in Cleveland grew by 4.2%.

Photo credit: “Canada blank map” by Lokal_Profil image cut to remove USA by Paul Robinson – Vector map BlankMap-USA-states-Canada-provinces.svg.Modified by Lokal_Profil. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canada_blank_map.svg#mediaviewer/File:Canada_blank_map.svg

Kolivakis: Can the Caisse Make Money on Public Transit?

Pension360 has covered the fascinating partnership between Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec and the province’s public transit system.

But some observers – including Moody’s – have doubts that the partnership will prove fruitful for Caisse.

Over at Pension Pulse, Leo Kolivakis has thrown his expertise into the ring. In a post on Monday, he comments on the concerns over the partnership, and what Caisse needs to do to make this venture a successful one.

The post is printed below.

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By Leo Kolivakis, Pension Pulse

A month ago, I covered the announcement of the Caisse handling Quebec’s infrastructure needs and stressed the primacy of good governance.

But now critics are coming out to question the economic viability of this decision as well as the process, stressing a private-public partnership is more efficient. I asked a friend of mine who knows infrastructure and he told me he doesn’t know much about light rail transit. He also somewhat cynically quipped: “Who uses quotes from geography professors?”.

I’m a little more open-minded than my friend as I trust geography professors more than economists when it comes to urban planning. Having said this, I question whether a public-private partnership, especially here in scandal-ridden Quebec, would be more “efficient” and in the best interest of Quebec’s taxpayers.

As far as the Caisse’s infrastructure group, they have made money in the past on transit but this is a different beast altogether. They will be playing a much more direct and central role in developing and overseeing these projects from start to finish, as well as managing fares to make them economically viable.

Macky Tall, a senior vice-president in charge of the Caisse’s infrastructure portfolio, raises excellent points on leveraging the Caisse’s real estate expertise to help fund these projects. More importantly, he’s absolutely right, new model is better for the Caisse than a traditional public-private agreement because it will retain ownership indefinitely, and can spread out its return over a longer period, not having to recoup its initial investment in the first 35 years.

Having said this, there are legitimate concerns about how this project will be handled and how the Caisse can fulfill its dual mandate of achieving the actuarial returns its clients need while it develops Quebec’s economy. If something goes wrong in a major multibillion infrastructure project, this can have a severe impact on the Caisse’s long-term results.

But there is no question that Montreal desperately needs to develop its infrastructure. Peter Hadekel of the Montreal Gazette wrote a comment a couple of weeks ago, Stagnation city: Exploring Montreal’s economic decline, where he stressed among other things the need to focus on infrastructure projects to bolster Montreal’s stagnating economy.

I’m highly skeptical of Montreal’s economic future, especially now that Canada’s crisis is just beginning. On a relative basis the city will do better than Calgary or Edmonton, which will bear the brunt of the economic weakness that comes with the plunge in oil prices. But this city has been stagnating for a very long time and never experienced the boom that Canada’s other major cities experienced.

Moreover, the primary factor behind Montreal’s stagnation remains a political climate that hinders outside investments and forced many anglophones, allophones and even francophones in Quebec to move elsewhere in search of better opportunities. My biggest concern is institutional racism pervading many of Quebec’s government and quasi-government organizations as well as large private corporations (let’s not kid each other, diversity in the workplace is not Quebec’s strong suit, not that the rest of Canada is any better).

But let’s leave the politics aside and get back to the Caisse and building these light rail transit projects. One of the key elements of good pension governance is communication. The Caisse needs to be open, transparent and very clear on the terms and costs at every stage of these projects if they intend to have the public’s support because if something goes wrong, it will be another fiasco that will make the ABCP scandal the media is covering up look like a walk in the park.

Photo by Claire Brownlow via Flickr CC License

Leo Kolivakis on Paying Pension Executives

cut up one hundred dollar bill — Photo by TaxCredits.net

This week, the Financial Times released a list of the highest-paid pension CEOs, and interviewed observers from several corners who criticized the high compensation totals.

On Wednesday, Leo Kolivakis of Pension Pulse weighed in on pension executive pay in an extensive piece. The post is re-printed below.

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By Leo Kolivakis, Pension Pulse

It’s about time the media and non-profit organizations start scrutinizing executive pay at public pension funds. I’ve been covering the good, the bad and downright ugly on executive compensation at Canada’s large public pension funds since the inception of this blog back in June 2008.

In fact, my very first post was on the ABCP of pension governance where I wrote:

If compensation is tied to performance and benchmarks, doesn’t the public have a right to know whether or not the benchmarks used to evaluate this performance accurately reflect the risks taken by the investment manager(s)?

The dirtiest secret in the pension fund world is that benchmarks used to reference the performance of private investments and hedge fund activities in public pension funds are grossly underestimating the risks taken by the managers to achieve their returns. Moreover, most of the “alpha” from these investment activities is just “beta” of the underlying asset class. Why are pension executives being compensated for what is essentially beta?!?!?

There is a disconnect between public market benchmarks and private market benchmarks. Most pension funds use well known public market benchmarks like the S&P 500 to evaluate the performance of their internal and external managers. Public market benchmarks are well known and for the most part, they accurately reflect the risks that investment managers are taking (the worst example was the ABCP fallout at the Caisse which the media keeps covering up).

But there are no standard private market benchmarks; these investments are illiquid and valued on a quarterly basis with lags. This leads to some serious issues. In particular, if the underlying benchmark does not reflect the risk of private market investments, a pension fund can wipe out its entire risk budget if real estate or private equity gets hit hard in any given year, which is not hard to fathom in the current environment.

I followed up that first blog comment with my second comment on alternative investments and bogus benchmarks where I used the returns and benchmarks of real estate investments at a few of Canada’s large public pension funds to demonstrate how some were gaming their benchmarks to claim “significant outperformance and value-added” in order to justify their multimillion compensation packages even as their funds lost billions during the crisis.

In April 2009, I went to Parliament Hill where I was invited to speak at the Standing Committee on Finance on matters relating to pensions (after that hearing, I was even confronted by Claude Lamoureux, the former CEO at Ontario Teachers largely credited for starting this trend to pay top dollars to senior pension fund managers, which then spread elsewhere). There, I discussed abuses on benchmarks and how pension fund managers routinely game private market benchmarks to create “value-added” in their overall results to justify some seriously hefty payouts for their senior executives.

This brings me to the list above (click on image at the top). Where is Gordon Fyfe, the man who you can all indirectly credit for this blog? He should be right up there at the top of this list. He left PSP for bcIMC this past summer right on time to evade getting grilled on why PSP skirted foreign taxes, embarrassing the federal government.

In fact, over the ten years at the helm of PSP Investments, a federal Crown corporation that is in charge of managing the pensions of people on the federal government’s payroll, Gordon Fyfe and his senior executives literally made off like bandits, especially in the last few years. This is why I poked fun at them when I covered PSP’s FY 2014 results but was dead serious when I wrote this:

And why are benchmarks important? Because they determine compensation. Last year, there was an uproar over the hefty payouts for PSP’s senior executives. And this year isn’t much different.

[Click here for picture].

As you can see, PSP’s senior executives all saw a reduction in total compensation (new rules were put in place to curb excessive comp) but they still made off like bandits, collecting millions in total compensation. Once again, Mr. Fyfe made the most, $4.2 million in FY 2014 and a whopping total of close to $13 million over the last three fiscal years.

This type of excessive compensation for public pension fund managers beating their bogus private market benchmarks over a four-year rolling return period really makes my blood boil. Where is the Treasury Board and Auditor General of Canada when it comes to curbing such blatant abuses? (As explained here, the Auditor General of Canada rubber stamps financial audits but has failed to do an in-depth performance audit of PSP).

And don’t think that PSP’s employees are all getting paid big bucks. The lion’s share of the short-term incentive plan (STIP) and long-term incentive plan (LTIP) was paid out to five senior executives but other employees did participate.

But enough ranting about PSP’s tricky balancing act, I’ve covered that topic ad nauseum and think the Auditor General of Canada really dropped the ball in its 2011 Special Examination which was nothing more than a sham, basically rubber stamping the findings of PSP’s financial auditor, Deloitte.

Nothing is more contentious than CEO pay at public sector organizations. The Vancouver Sun just published an article listing the top salaries of public sector executives where it states:

Topping this year’s salary ranking is former bcIMC CEO Doug Pearce, with total remuneration of $1.5 million in 2013, the most recent year for which data is available. That’s a 24-per-cent jump from his pay the year before of $1.2 million.

It could be the last No. 1 ranking for Pearce, who has topped The Sun’s salary ranking several times: he retired in the summer of 2014 and was replaced by Gordon Fyfe.

Wait till the socialist press in British Columbia see Fyfe’s remuneration, that will really rattle them!

It’s worth noting however even in Canada, compensation of senior public pension fund managers varies considerably. On one end of the spectrum, you have Jim Leech and Gordon Fyfe, and on the other end you have Leo de Bever, Michael Sabia and Doug Pearce, Fyfe’s predecessor at bcIMC (Ron Mock currently lies in the middle but his compensation will rise significantly to reflect his new role).

Mark Wiseman and André Bourbonnais, PSP’s new CEO, actually fall in the upper average of this wide spectrum but there’s no doubt, they also enjoyed hefty payouts in FY 2014 (notice however, Wiseman and Bourbonnais made the same amount, which shows you their compensation system is much flatter than the one at PSP’s).

Still, teachers, police officers, firemen, civil servants, soldiers, nurses, all making extremely modest incomes and suffering from budget cuts and austerity, will look at these hefty payouts and rightfully wonder why are senior public pension fund managers managing their retirement being compensated like some of Canada’s top private sector CEOs and making more than their private sector counterparts working at mutual funds and banks?

And therein lies the sticking point. The senior executives at Ontario Teachers, CPPIB, PSP, bcIMC, AIMCo, OMERS, Caisse are all managing assets of public sector workers that have no choice on who manages their assets. These public sector employees are all captive clients of these large pensions. I’m not sure about the nurses and healthcare workers at HOOPP but that is a private pension plan (never understood why it is private and not public but the compensation of HOOPP’s senior executives is in line with that at other large Canadian pension funds, albeit not as high even if along with Teachers, it’s arguably the best pension plan in Canada).

Of course, all this negative press on payouts at public pension funds can also be a huge distraction and potentially disastrous. Importantly, Canada’s large public pension funds are among the best in the world precisely because unlike the United States and elsewhere, they got the governance and compensation right, operating at arms-length from the government and paying people properly to deliver outstanding results in public and private markets.

And let’s be clear on something, the brutal truth on defined-contribution plans is they simply can’t compete with Canada’s large defined-benefit pensions and will never be able to match their results because they’re not investing across public and private markets, they don’t have the scale to significantly lower costs and don’t enjoy a very long investment horizon. Also, Canada’s large pensions invest directly in public and private assets and many of them also invest and co-invest with the very best private equity, real estate funds and hedge funds.

In other words, it’s not easy comparing public pension fund payouts to their private sector counterparts because the skills required to manage private investments are different than those required to manage public investments.

I’ll share something else with you. I remember having a conversation with Mark Wiseman when I last visited CPPIB and he told me flat out that he knows he’s being compensated extremely well. He also told me even though he will never be able to attract top talent away from private equity funds, CPPIB’s large pool of capital (due to captive clients), long investment horizon and competitive compensation is why he’s able to attract top talent from places like Goldman Sachs.

In fact, Bourbonnais’s successor at CPPIB, Mark Jenkins, is a Goldman alumni but let’s be clear, most people are still dying to work at Goldman where compensation is significantly higher than at any other place.

But we need to be very careful when discussing compensation at Canada’s large pensions. The shift toward private assets which everyone is doing — mostly because they want to shift away from volatile public markets and unlock hidden value in private investments using their long investment horizon, and partly because they can game their private market benchmarks more easily — requires a different skill set and you have to pay up for that skill set in order to deliver outstanding long-term results.

Also, as I noted above, Canadian pensions invest a significant portion of their assets internally. This last point was underscored in an email Jim Keohane, CEO of HOOPP, sent me regarding the FT article above where he notes (added emphasis is mine):

You have to be careful with this type of simple comparison of Canadian pension plans with their US, European and Australian counterparts. It is a bit like comparing apples to oranges because the Canadian pension funds operate very different business models. The large Canadian funds use in house management teams to manage the vast majority of their assets, whereas most of these foreign funds mentioned outsource all or a significant portion of their assets to third party money managers. They are paying significantly larger amounts to these third party managers to run their money as compared to the amounts that Canadian pension funds pay their internal staff. As a result, their total implementation costs are significantly higher than Canadian funds. The right metric to compare is total implementation costs, and on this metric, Canadian funds are among the most efficient in the world.

We have very low implementation costs, with investment costs of approximately 20bps and total operating costs including the admin side between 30 and 35bps. We hire top investment managers to run our money and need to pay market competitive compensation to attract and retain them. I would agree that our long term nature and captive capital make us an attractive place to work so we don’t have to be the highest payer to attract talent, but we need to be in the ballpark. Running our money internally is significantly cheaper than the outsourcing alternative. It also allows you to pursue strategies that would be very difficult to pursue via an outsourcing solution, and it enables much more effective risk management.

One of the main reasons why Canadian pension plans have been successful is the independent governance structures that have been put in place. This enables funds like HOOPP to be run like a business in the best interest of the plan members. It is in the members best interest to implement the plan at the lowest possible cost. The cheapest way for us to run the fund is using an in-house staff paying them competitive compensation rather than outsource which would be much more costly. To put this in perspective, a few years ago we had 15% of our fund outsourced to third party money managers, and that 15% cost more to run than the other 85%!

Many of the international funds used for comparison in the article have poor governance structures fraught with political interference *which makes it politically unpalatable to write large cheques to in-house managers, so instead they write much larger cheques to outside managers because it gets masked as paying for a service. This is not in plan members best interests.

I agree with all the points Jim Keohane raises in regard to the pitfalls of making international comparisons.

But does this mean we shouldn’t scrutinize compensation at Canada’s large public pensions? Absolutely not. A few weeks ago when I discussed whether pensions are systemically important with Jim, I said we don’t need to regulate them with some omnipotent regulator but we definitely need to continuously improve pension governance:

… I brought up the point that in the past, Canadian public pensions have made unwise investment decisions, and some of them could have exacerbated the financial crisis. The ABCP crisis had a somewhat happy ending but only because the Bank of Canada got involved and forced players to negotiate a deal, averting a systemic crisis. And we still don’t know everything that led to this crisis because the media in Quebec and elsewhere are covering it up.

I also told him we need to introduce uniform comprehensive performance, operational and risk audits at all of Canada’s major pensions and these audits need to be conducted by independent and qualified third parties that are properly staffed to conduct them. I blasted the Auditor General of Canada for its flimsy audit of PSP Investments, but the truth is we need better, more comprehensive audits across the board and the findings should be made public.

Another thing I mentioned was maybe we don’t need any central securities regulator. All we need is for the Bank of Canada to have a lot more transparency on all investment activities at all of Canada’s public and private pensions. The Bank of Canada already has information on public investments but it needs more input, especially on less liquid public and private investments.

This is where I stand. I think it’s up to Canada’s large public (and private) pension funds to really make a serious effort in explaining their benchmarks, the risks they take, the value-added and how it determines their compensation in the clearest, most transparent terms but I also think we need independent overview of their investment and operational activities above and beyond what their financial auditors and public auditors currently provide us.

Importantly, there’s a huge gap that needs to be filled to significantly improve the governance at Canada’s large pensions, even if they are widely recognized as having world-class governance.

Finally, I remind all of you that it takes a lot of time and effort to share these insights. I’ve paid a heavy price for being so outspoken but I’m proud of my contributions and rest assured, while we can debate compensation at Canada’s large pensions, there’s no denying I’m THE most underpaid, under-appreciated senior pension analyst in the world!

Kolivakis Weighs In On Canada Pensions’ Clean Energy Bet

This week, two Canadian pension funds — the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board and the Public Sector Pension Investment Board – teamed up with Spanish bank Banco Santandar S.A. to manage a $2 billion portfolio of renewable energy assets.

Leo Kolivakis of the Pension Pulse blog weighed in on the clean energy bet in a post on Wednesday. The post is re-published below.

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Originally published at Pension Pulse

This is a big deal and I expect to see more deals like this in the future as more European banks shed private assets to meet regulatory capital requirements. In doing so, they will looking to partner up with global pension and sovereign wealth funds that have very long-term investment horizons.

The Spaniards are global leaders in infrastructure projects (Germans and French are also top global infrastructure investors led by giants like HOCHTIEF and VINCI). When it comes to renewable energy, Spain is the first country to rely on wind as top energy source:

Spain is the first country in the world to draw a plurality of its power from wind energy for an entire year, according to new reports by the country’s energy regulator and wind energy advocacy group Spanish Wind Energy Association (AEE).

Wind accounted for 20.9 percent of the country’s energy last year — more than any other enough to power about 15.5 million households, with nuclear coming in a very close second at 20.8 percent. Wind energy usage was up over 13 percent from the year before, according to the report.

The news is being hailed by environmental advocates as a sign that Spain, and perhaps the rest of the world, is ready for a future based on renewables. But the record comes at the end of a very rocky year for Spain’s renewable energy sector, which was destabilized by subsidy cutbacks and arguments over how much the government should regulate renewable energy companies.

Despite the flaws in Spain’s system, the numbers are promising for green energy fans. The renewable push brought down Spain’s greenhouse gas emissions by 23 percent, according to another industry report from Red Electric Espana (REE).

Spain also has one of the largest solar industries in the world, with solar power accounting for almost 2,000 megawatts in 2012. That’s more than many countries but still just a fraction of the energy produced by wind in Spain. In 2013, solar power accounted for 3.1 percent of Spain’s energy, according to the AEE report.

By contrast, the U.S. produced only 9 percent of its energy with renewable sources last year, and wind accounted for only 15 percent of that.

But as the world reaches for more renewables, Spain’s record-breaking year is also a cautionary tale.

Going into 2014, it’s unclear how wind will survive steep government cutbacks.

At the moment, Spain heavily subsidizes its renewable energy sector, which costs billions of dollars in a country still in the depths of a financial crisis. When the country tried to raise individual rates for renewables, people complained bitterly and the government backed off, leaving the country with a nearly $35 billion renewable energy deficit.

The idea that renewables can’t survive without heavy subsidies might be cooling off the market in Spain and elsewhere, bringing the future of renewable growth into question. Global investment in renewable energy slipped 12 percent last year, despite the fact that the European Union and the UN have set ambitious energy goals for the next decade.

It remains unclear how the world will meet those goals given the spending-averse climate of most Western governments, but there’s no doubt they’ll be looking to Spain in 2014 to see if it can be done without going broke.

Indeed, over the summer, Spain’s government dealt a death blow to renewable energy:

In the latest move to draw down Spain’s energy sector debt, Madrid unveiled a new clean energy bill this week that will cap earnings on power plants as well as introduce retroactive actions, earning a quick rebuke from the country’s already ailing renewable sector. According to a Bloomberg report, clean energy “generators will earn a rate of return of about 7.5 percent over their lifetimes,” adding that the rate may be revised every three years and is based on “the average interest of a 10-year sovereign bond plus 3 percentage points.” The new plan will be retroactively applied to programs active from July 2013.

The new plan was presented by Spain’s Industry Minister Jose Manuel Soria as a necessary evolution of the country’s renewable energy subsidy system, which he said would have gone bankrupt if no changes were made. Since taking over the country’s leadership in 2011, the right-leaning Partido Popular has continued to expand on earlier efforts to chip away at the country’s renewable energy support programs, which many critics have called unsustainable. Once hailed as one of Spain’s most viable sectors for strong growth, renewable energy has suffered under a steady restructuring of government support programs.

In addition to slowing the country’s solar and wind growth, the restructuring garnered legal action on the part of both international investors and domestic trade organizations, the latter of which has appealed to the European Commission for some level of protection from tariff and agreement reductions. Early cuts resulted in legal action against Madrid from over a dozen investment funds with stakes in the country’s solar market, adding to the unease of foreign investors.

I can tell you the cash strapped Greek government did the exact same thing on solar projects in Greece. One of the biggest risks in infrastructure projects is regulatory risk as these governments can change regulations at a moment’s notice, severely impacting the projected revenues.

What are the other risks with infrastructure projects? Currency risk and illiquidity risk as these are very long-term projects, typically with a much longer investment horizon than private equity or real estate.

But both PSP and Ontario Teachers’ are aware of these risks and still went ahead with this investments which meets their objective of finding investments that match their long-term liabilities. The Caisse has also been buying wind farms but I am wondering whether they’re blowing billions in the wind.

Interestingly, this is the second major deal between PSP and OTPP this year. In November, I wrote about how they are nearing a $7 billion deal for Canadian satellite company Telesat Holdings Inc.

And on last week, Bloomberg reported that Riverbed Technology (RVBD), under pressure from activist investor Elliott Management Corp., agreed to be acquired for about $3.6 billion by private-equity firm Thoma Bravo and Teacher’s Private Capital.

In fact, Ontario Teachers’ has been very busy completing all sorts of private market deals lately, all outside of Canada, which is smart.

Photo by penagate via Flickr CC