Free Republic

California is experiencing a pension inferno! One of the biggest public pension plans in the US plans to borrow tens of billions of dollars to maintain liquidity instead of triggering a fire-sale of its assets. Bloomberg reports the roughly $318 billion California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) plans to borrow $30 billion, or about 10% of its portfolio, instead of raising funds through an asset sale that might trigger fire sales. Borrowing to lever up its real estate-laden portfolio when CRE returns are negative?? Calstrs board members will review the first draft of the policy next Thursday. If approved, the...

Insurance company Lloyd’s of London has announced its exit from a net-zero alliance for insurers—the sixth such organization to have pulled out from the initiative within a week. The Net-Zero Insurance Alliance (NZIA), convened by the United Nations, seeks to commit group members, composed of the world’s leading insurers and reinsurers, to fighting climate change. As part of this, members have to transition their insurance and reinsurance underwriting portfolios to net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050. On Friday, Lloyd’s of London quit the NZIA. This took the total number of members who have quit NZIA this week alone to...

House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan and two other House Republicans sent four letters to the heads of massive companies such as BlackRock and Vanguard, calling on them to explain corporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) efforts that could violate federal antitrust laws. The Daily Caller first obtained copies of the letters, which were sent Thursday to the heads of Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street. Jordan was joined by Republican North Carolina Rep. Dan Bishop and Republican Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie. In all of the letters, the lawmakers say the companies appear to...

Woke governance that has sent profits spiraling at companies like Anheuser-Busch and Target often begins with lefty investment firms pressuring them to push products their way, an ex-top Anheuser-Busch exec said. ... Anson Frericks said behind-the-scenes politicking from firms like New York-based BlackRock and Pennsylvania-based Vanguard spur many of the controversial decisions sparking nationwide boycotts from longtime more conservative customers — such as the ill-fated Bud Light promotion with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney He said BlackRock, Vanguard, and another firm, State Street, manage about $20 trillion in capital and use their clout to promote agenda politics being pushed on them...

Three high-profile Democratic governors are struggling to stabilize their states’ retirement programs due to a falling stock market and may have difficulties paying out benefits in the coming years.

If the Dow finishes down for the week, which it is solidly on pace to do, it would be its eighth-straight weekly loss. That would be the longest weekly losing streak since 1923, according to FactSet data reviewed by LPL Financial.The long stretch of losses underscores the negative mood on Wall Street as investors grow nervous about high inflation – and what the Federal Reserve will have to do to get prices under control.

NEW YORK, Jan 31 (Reuters) - U.S. public pension funds will likely have to switch to more aggressive investment strategies in the coming years to fill funding gaps despite assets held by sovereign investors having grown to record levels amid the 2021 equity market boom, a new report said. On average, the difference between assets and liabilities at U.S. public pension funds, known as the "funded ratio," remains "unsatisfactory" at less than 75%, sovereign investor specialist Global SWF said in a report. To boost returns, many will likely have to focus on alternative assets, including private equity and private credit,...

The left exploits the Green Revolution to further its ecological agenda of destroying the present economic system. Its special target has long been Big Oil, which plays a dominant role in the global economy. Bolstered by the support of Big Media, Green activists are trying hard to bring the present system down. The Greens’ relentless war on oil and gas usually involves a battle of data and reports. For decades, the left has presented the inconvenient truth of dire hockey-stick-graph predictions that are constantly pushed back when doomsday fails to arrive. The oil companies defend themselves by pointing to their...

More than £1 billion in debt and just hours before a meeting where he would be asked to explain a £38 million hole in his Mirror Newspapers' pension funds, Robert Maxwell's 22st body was found floating in the sea near the Canary Islands. Last Sunday, in the first part of our serialisation of a gripping new biography of the tycoon, we told of the run-up to his death. Here, in the final extract, we tell how the fall-out from it still reverberates today. Within hours of Robert Maxwell's death on November 5, 1991, tributes from world leaders began pouring in....

When Ready for Hillary, a pro-Hillary Rodham Clinton “super PAC,” wanted to take out a million-dollar loan five months before it planned to go out of business, it turned to a bank that was founded to guard the savings of New York City garment workers.When the Democracy Alliance, an influential club of liberal donors, sought to recruit members in advance of the 2016 elections, the bank’s president helped to make introductions.And when workers-rights groups wanted to embarrass Walmart and the Gap for unsafe working conditions at factories supplying their stores, Amalgamated Bank, which manages $40 billion in pension fund assets,...

Rahm Emanuel raised taxes to get city worker pension funds on a ‘path to solvency.’ The shortfall still ballooned by $7 billion. ... A record-high property tax increase. A new tax on water and sewer service. A higher 911 emergency fee on telephone lines... Emanuel’s series of tax hikes was painful, but he promised the extra money was part of a plan to get the woefully underfunded city worker pension funds on a “path to solvency.”.. in the four years since .. The pension funds are actually worse off. When Emanuel pushed through the tax hikes, the city worker retirement...

For each active worker, four pensioners. For 169 governmental bodies, the numbers are lopsided. In some cases hundreds — and in Chicago’s case, thousands — more retirees are drawing from a fund than active workers are paying into it. Even in a small suburban district such as the Arlington Heights Park District, 432 retirees are pulling from that district’s pension fund with only 103 active employees paying into it. In the city of Chicago, according to the treasurer’s numbers, the gap is smaller in percentage terms, but in terms of the gap, more dramatic. Including Chicago Board of Education administrative...

One of the architects of Mayor Bill de Blasio's housing plan is living well at the taxpayer's expense... Anita Laremont, the executive director of the Department of City Planning, as one of four civil servants raking in more than $300,000 this fiscal year thanks to special permission to receive both a public paycheck and public-pension payments. Waivers granted under Section 211 of New York's Retirement and Social Security Law are supposed to allow the state and local governments to attract and retain employees younger than 65 ... the real number of high-earning double-dippers may be considerably greater because waivers are...

Vanecko and Davis. Their firm made millions in fees even as retirement plans for teachers, cops, other Chicago city workers suffered big losses. A dozen years ago, five financially strapped city of Chicago pension funds invested $68 million in a shaky real estate deal put together by a former boss of resident Barack Obama and a nephew of Mayor Richard M. Daley. It was a high-risk investment. Allison S. Davis — who once headed a small Chicago law firm that gave Obama his first job out of Harvard Law School — and Daley nephew Robert G. Vanecko even warned in...

Here are two recent events you might have missed: In March, House speaker Paul Ryan was widely quoted as saying, “The last thing we want to do is pass historic tax relief and then undo that, so we are not going to raise gas taxes.”The next month, in California, Republicans submitted 54 percent more than the required signatures to put on the November ballot a measure that would repeal the 2017 state law increasing gasoline and diesel taxes. Meanwhile, roads in Los Angeles are in such bad shape that it costs the average driver $892 a year in additional vehicle...

Eight Danish pension funds have been criticized after investing over 140 million kroner (€19 million) in US electric car giant Tesla. The investments, details of which were published by media Ugebrevet A4, have been censured due to Tesla’s policy of banning unions along with its reputation for low wages and high incidence of workplace accidents, reports news agency Ritzau. “The way I see it, the pension funds ought to withdraw from a company that oppresses its employees and forbids unions,” job market researcher Henning Jørgensen, a professor at Aalborg University, told Ugebrevet A4. “This is a question of withdrawing as...

A rare point of agreement between President-Elect Trump and Congressional Democrats is that America has an infrastructure deficit: The nation’s transportation, power, water and sewerage facilities are too often outdated and unable to reliably serve a growing population. But while the diagnosis crosses party lines, solutions are more controversial. Democrats may not be too worried about the recent increase in federal deficits, but Republicans who have made an issue of the national debt will be reluctant to produce more red ink. Likewise, tax increases to pay for new federal construction spending are off the table under Trump and a Republican-controlled...

Pension funds and other asset owners increasingly are investing in U.S. infrastructure, often buying the assets from infrastructure money managers. This could be a win-win. Investor interest comes at a time when the first crop of infrastructure funds raised in the U.S. in 2004 and 2005 are coming to the end of their 10-year life span. Managers are expected to bring more transactions to market to take advantage of growing interest by direct investors. Industry insiders expect more infrastructure core projects to change to institutional investor ownership. Investors prize the core projects, even though returns generally are lower than investments...

The law, which took effect Saturday, allows Pennsylvania to seize some retirement accounts three years after they're presumed abandoned - regardless of the account owner's age. Previously, the state waited until individuals reached age 701/2 before seizing retirement accounts and liquidating the portfolios. Now, older folks and famously contact-averse millennials could be affected. Valley Forge-based Vanguard, with more than $3 trillion in assets, isn't happy about the state's budget-inspired change and plans to join forces with others in the financial industry to repeal the law next year. ... For those who opt to communicate electronically, the "lost contact" trigger is...

While warming up a Detroit crowd for President Barack Obama’s Labor Day speech, Teamsters union president Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. said unions need to fight a “war” against tea partiers and congressional Republicans. “President Obama, this is your army,” Hoffa said. “We are ready to march. Let’s take these sons of bitches out and take America back to where America we belong.”