And given inflation in housing, food, fuel, healthcare, education, clothing, etc, is there any additional information needed to understand why more than 60% of American adults can’t meet an emergency $500 expenditure? But, everything is wonderful in our economy today? Are you kidding me!

A number of public pension systems moved aggressively into hedge funds following the Great Financial Crisis. What they were hedging is anyone’s guess given that cheap beta could be obtained at a 50% discount. But, allocate they did.

We aren’t proponents of using the return on asset assumption (ROA) as the primary objective for a pension plan preferring that plan’s specific liabilities, but it certainly is a good objective for the asset-side of the equation. Ten years ago the “average” ROA for a public system was certainly in excess of 7.5% (today it is estimated at 7.25%). Have hedge funds kept pace?

According to HFRI’s Hedge Fund Composite, the universe of hedge fund managers has produced a 3.6% annualized return for the 7 years ending June 30, 2018. If you go back 10 years, that return is only 3.5%. If you go all the way back 20 years, which would include two significant bear market environments, this collection of funds has produced a 4% return. Fairly consistent, but certainly anemic.

If you think that maybe the HFRI data has some quirks associated with it, the Credit Suisse and Barclay hedge fund composites produced 7-year returns of 3.6% and 4.5% respectively, while 10-year returns came in at 3.2% and 4.3%, respectively. Still ugly!

One saving grace is the fact that these are net returns. Unfortunately, the only thing that has been “hedged” during this period of time is return, as much of the reallocated capital flowed from traditional equity exposures. Oh, and the S&P 500 for the 7- and 10-year periods produced 13.2% and 10.2% annualized returns.

It is time to stop focusing on the ROA as the plan’s objective.  Managing a pension system is about meeting the promise at the lowest cost and not the highest return. Trying to “guess” how markets will perform and correlate with one another is a fool’s game. This approach hasn’t worked and it won’t work going forward. Manage your plan against your liabilities, especially the retired lives, which are known and manageable!

Senator Bernie Sanders has sponsored S.805, the Inclusive Prosperity Act of 2017. The intent of the bill is to ensure that Wall Street pays their “fair share” to support the U.S. Middle Class. Sanders’ Bill would “impose a tax on certain (nearly all!) trading transactions to invest in our families and communities, improve our infrastructure and our environment strengthen our financial security, expand opportunity and reduce market volatility.” Wow, that’s a lot in one piece of legislation.

Among the plethora of reasons cited for this legislation, Congress finds:

“The global financial crisis was caused by financial firms taking great financial risks without disclosing those risks to their investors or their regulators, and by regulatory failures to adequately police the financial services markets for crime, unfair or deceptive practices, fraud, lack of transparency, and mismanagement.”

Furthermore, “nurses, teachers, public safety officers, and other public sector workers have faced drastic funding cuts, harming our long-term public safety and prospects for economic growth.”

This last point is very interesting because the very people this bill is intended to help may, in fact, get hurt. How? According to Kirsten Wegner, CEO Modern Markets Initiative, whose study looked at the impact of this tax on pension plans estimates that the cost could be “startling”. Their analysis suggests that California and New York City funds would pay $1 billion and $500 million, respectively, in additional annual fees. The analysis further estimates that a hypothetical $2 billion pension fund would incur additional transaction costs of roughly $4 million per year. It is highly unlikely that Wall Street would absorb these fees, but would rather pass them on through higher commission rates.

In an environment of already challenging funded ratios and contribution expense, the last thing that our public pension systems need is another tax that could dramatically impact their solvency. As laudable as it might be to want to provide access to college for all, student loan relief, enhanced access to medical care, etc, the unintended consequences from this bill may far outweigh any benefit.

Preqin is reporting that the private equity industry had a record high of $3.1 Trillion in AUM as of December 31, 2017, representing a 20% increase from the prior year.  I don’t know about you, but I question whether the universe of potential investments has grown sufficiently to absorb all of this capital. I fear that the significant growth in the allocated capital will force private equity firms/funds to chase too few good deals, and the “winner” in the bidding war will actually end up being the loser when all is said and done.

It will be interesting to look back at vintage years 2018 and 2019 to see how these funds do in the next 10-12 years, especially if the exit strategy is an initial public offering that happens to coincide with a bear market. Remember those? Our industry’s trends are created through fund flows, and this appears to be a classic example of too much money chasing yesterday’s news.  I hope that I’m wrong.

We often refer to defined contribution plans as glorified savings accounts because of the ease with which participants can access their funds. According to a recent survey by PLANSPONSOR, 13% of 401(k) participants currently have an outstanding loan. Furthermore, the Vanguard Center for Retirement Research claims that 40% of DC participants have taken a loan at one time during the last five years.   Incredibly, this loan activity creates a series of defaults that produce annually $6 billion in account leakage.

The KCS defined contribution business sees first hand the onerous impact from easy access to one’s “retirement” account. Our colleagues on that team receive frequent calls from our many plan participants seeking immediate access through their loan provisions. The reasons for needing funds cover all the bases from education to health to housing to the sublime.

In order to help protect retirement accounts from becoming emergency savings vehicles, there is a push to establish side-car accounts either within retirement accounts or separate that would take after-tax payroll deductions. The idea is to fund the emergency account up to $1,000 or $1,500.  Any additional contributions would flow to a participant’s retirement account for long-term investment. If the participant taps into their emergency fund, future after-tax contributions would be used to replenish the savings account before making additional contributions into the retirement vehicle.

Earlier this week The Strengthening Financial Security Through Short-term Savings Act, S.3218 was introduced by a bipartisan group of Senators—Cory Booker (D-NJ), Tom Cotton (R-AR), Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), and Todd Young (R-IN) to allow employers to offer short-term savings accounts with automatic contribution arrangements for financial emergencies. Getting this legislation through Congress should be a priority. The demise of the defined benefit pension has placed great responsibility on the individual to fund, manage, and disburse a retirement account. This legislation will help remove some of the barriers to accomplishing that objective.

Ryan ALM is out with their second quarter pension scorecard, and things aren’t that bad so far in 2018 despite lackluster asset class returns. Ryan ALMs asset mix produced only a 1.09% return for the six months, which would look quite weak if we were just focused on the return on asset assumption.  However, when viewing asset returns relative to a plan’s liabilities, the correct objective, asset performance looks pretty attractive.  How’s that?

Liability growth has been negative for the first six months when looking at more appropriate valuation criteria.  In fact, under FAS 158 (ASC 715) liabilities are down -6.63% through June 30th. On a mark-to-market basis using Treasury STRIPS, liabilities have generated a -2.89% return. It is only using the GASB methodology that allows for the use of the ROA as a liability discount rate do we get a positive number for the first half at 3.75%.

Public pension plan executives and their boards must be wringing their hands quite a bit thinking that funded ratios are falling when in fact the first half of 2018 is not that bad when using a mark-to-market accounting. According to Ryan ALM, plan assets have exceeded liabilities using Treasury STRIPS by 4.0% during this period.

How about requesting (requiring) public pension systems to use multiple discount rates to measure liabilities so that the sponsor and their board have a full picture of how plan assets are doing versus the promise that has been made.  Inappropriate decisions may just be taken without a true understanding of how things are stacking up.

Anyone who has ever read one of the KCS blog posts knows that we are big fans of defined benefit plans for the masses, both private and public employees. We fear the negative implications of our failure to preserve and protect these valuable benefits given that the alternative is to have untrained individuals become portfolio managers responsible for their retirement. Nuts!

However, a recent excellent report by Jonathan Trichter, a candidate for NY State Comptroller, suggests that new employees in defined benefit plans are getting short-changed relative to those employees who have greater tenure because of the tiering of benefits that have occurred. We agree. In fact, the NY State Employees Retirement System (ERS) currently has 6 different tiers and one’s benefits are determined by the start date.

We believe that employees doing the same job should receive the same benefits, and it shouldn’t matter how long they have been in that position. According to Trichter, longer-tenured State and local workers in NYSLRS will have about 60%-100% of their benefit financed through employer contributions. For younger employees that percentage falls to about 20%.

It gets worse, as roughly 70% of newer employees will never receive one dollar in employer-financed benefits. Furthermore, about 2/3rds of workers hired at 25-years-old would be better off cashing out their contributions than receiving a pension at a later date.

Trichter’s report proposes several solutions. As we stated above, we aren’t huge fans of DC alternatives but given the math above, it doesn’t make sense for younger employees in multi-tiered pension systems to fund someone else’s pension without the benefit of one for themselves. We think that Jonathan Trichter’s report/analysis is worth your investment of time.

Just read a thoughtful piece by Jennifer Mueller, titled “How the Janus Ruling Might Doom Public Pension Next”. Of course, the Janus, in this case, is the (Mark) Janus versus AFSCME lawsuit, which saw the Supreme Court overturn 40 years of “settled law” dealing a blow to organized labor’s fundraising activities. Mueller believe’s that this legislative decision could create a similar outcome for public pension systems that mandate employee contributions to help fund future benefits.

Let’s assume that a public union worker that opposes many of the union’s positions refuses to allow a deduction for “dues”.  Would they also feel the same way if they knew that their employee contributions to the pension fund were being used to impact proxy voting decisions for many of the same issues that the union employee was opposed to when they withheld their dues? As Mueller points out when DB pension systems were first launched the plan’s investments consisted mostly of bonds and cash.  However, today those plans have roughly 50% of their assets in equity-related securities, which allow for a voice through the proxy process.

Public DB pension systems are already facing funding challenges, let’s hope that an employee of a public union and a participant in the retirement system can appreciate the benefit that is being provided later in life. A benefit that most of us in the private sector would love to have available.  It would be tragic if Janus versus AFSCME began to be applied to pension contributions, but if it were, defined contribution systems, in which the individual controls the investment decisions, would likely become the retirement system of choice. Oh, no!

The last one and one-half days at the Opal Public Funds Summit East conference has been filled with outstanding panel discussions on a variety of asset classes and investing strategies.  Each discussion geared toward the plan sponsor’s dilemma of achieving the return on asset assumption (ROA). For most public plans the ROA objective falls between 7% and 8%.

In this environment, the likelihood of meeting the ROA has been diminished, as the bull market for public equities and bonds extends.  The hand-wringing has been quite noticeable. Why? Because most plan sponsors have been told that achieving the ROA is the only way to pension “success”, meaning that a plan has accumulated the assets necessary to meet the plan’s promise to their participants (liability).  They are mistaken.

Trying to shoot for a combination of assets at this time that will achieve the Holy Grail ROA will likely mean that the plan has had to inject more risk (investment and liquidity) into the process. However, there is another path, but one that is seldom discussed among public fund trustees because their asset consultants and actuaries believe that plan assets and liabilities grow at the same discount rate, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

The possibility that a plan might generate a return well below the ROA can create anxiety for the sponsor, but their minds could be put at ease if they understood that liability growth can be negative.  How? Pension liabilities are highly interest rate sensitive similar to bonds. In a rising interest rate environment, both liabilities and bonds will fall in value. Pension liabilities also have a fairly long duration so “losses” can be significant, and funded ratios can improve quickly. More “money” isn’t the only formula for improving pension funding in an environment of rising rates.

Unfortunately, most sponsors don’t get a mark-to-market view on their plan’s liabilities as their actuary is likely presenting a once per year view under GASB preferring to discount liabilities at the ROA discount rate. By creating a set of economic books (preferred by the Society of Actuaries) a plan trustee can quickly see how interest rate sensitivity impacts liability growth. As the liabilities fall in value in a rising rate environment, the funded status can improve.  Plan sponsors should take risk off the table by cash flow matching as many of the plan’s retired lives as possible. The remainder of the assets now has an extended investment horizon that will prove useful in trying to capture the liquidity premium.

We’d love the opportunity to speak with you about our approach. Don’t fret about the possibility of missing the ROA objective, and certainly don’t stretch for return in this environment, as greater volatility will be realized but the hoped-for return might not.

I had the opportunity during the weekend to read the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) for a municipality, which will remain unnamed. These reports provide a lot of really good information.  I always find the Retirement Systems and Deferred  Income Plans section to be particularly interesting, and this report didn’t disappoint.

I was heartened to see that this municipality was participating in a state-sponsored defined benefit system that was actually using a discount rate of their liabilities (5%) that wasn’t equal to the state’s return on asset assumption (7%), and was truly more representative of a legitimate discount rate in today’s interest rate environment.

Where I take umbrage with this analysis is in the long-term “forecast” of asset class returns by either the asset consultant or actuary or both.  I had to laugh when reviewing the data because this (or these) entity (entities) had used 10.63% to represent the expected return for “debt-related private equity”. Buyouts/venture capital had a forecasted long-term estimate of 13.08%. In fact, 13 of the 15 asset class return forecasts were to the second decimal. Are you serious?

It is highly unlikely that these forecasters will get the first number to the left of the decimal place correct let alone get their prediction anywhere close to two decimal places to the right! Was the use of two decimal places supposed to make this a more legitimate exercise to prove that they had some mystical power to forecast what others couldn’t?

Again, managing a pension plan shouldn’t be about creating a return that exceeds some return on asset assumption (ROA), and in this case 7%. Managing a DB plan should be about exceeding liability growth, as that is the only reason why a plan exists in the first place. But, the industry spends nearly all of its time trying to build a better mousetrap when allocating assets and creating an investment structure. Everyone would be much better off in the long run, and there would be far less guesswork if the plan’s primary objective was the plan’s specific liabilities.

Furthermore, the return forecasting exercise, which was for the periods ending both June 30, 2017, and June 30, 2016, had the consultant/actuary use Global Debt ex U.S. as one of the asset class categories that had a 5% target allocation. The long-term forecasted return was -2.5%. Why then would you have this “asset” in your fund?

Finally, can we please stop making this process much harder than it needs to be? Can we stop playing games with long-term forecasted returns to two decimal places as if we have real knowledge of how markets will perform during the next 10-, 20-, or 30-year period? Can we finally agree that the only reason a pension plan exists is to fund a promise that was made to that entities employees? If we can agree to that, can we agree then that the true objective shouldn’t be a made up ROA, but that plan’s specific liabilities?