SUITABLE FOR QUOTING: Expert Responses to CalPERS' Monday, July 18 Earnings Report
For Immediate Release
July 18, 2016
California Policy Center
Contact: Will Swaim
Will@CalPolicyCenter.org
(714) 573-2231
California Policy Center Responses to Monday, July 18, 2016 Earnings Report
For reporters and commentary writers, the California Policy Center can make available two public finance experts. We also offer for publication these immediate responses to the CalPERS report:
ED RING: is president of the California Policy Center. He directs the organization’s research projects and is also the editor of the email newsletters Prosperity Digest and UnionWatch Digest. His work has been cited in the Los Angeles Times, Sacramento Bee, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and other national and regional publications.
“Current gains in the market are engineered by low interest rates and stock buy-backs. It is an unsustainable bubble.”
“CalPERS claims that infrastructure investments helped their portfolio returns, but they have less than 1% of their assets invested in infrastructure.
“CalPERS claims ‘fixed Income earned a 9.29 percent return’ in their most recent fiscal year. This is impossible to do without extremely high risk. Most fixed income investments today have returns of 3% or less.”
“If CalPERS is truly committed to transparency, they’ll stop investing in private equity, which by its very nature is not transparent.”
“If CalPERS truly believes they can earn 7.5%, or even 6.5%, then they should set a ceiling on the percent of payroll they demand from cities and counties, instead of perpetually increasing it.”
“If CalPERS truly believes they can earn 7.5%, then they’ll use that rate, instead of 3.8%, when calculating how much to charge a city or county that wants out of their system.”
“CalPERS depends on a Fed engineered asset bubble to remain solvent. As such, they are complicit with the Wall Street financial interests that control our national politicians and whom their union board members regularly decry.”
MARC JOFFE is a California Policy Center financial analyst and founder of Public Sector Credit Solutions in 2011. PSCS research has been published by the California State Treasurer’s Office, the Mercatus Center and the Macdonald-Laurier Institute among others. Before starting PSCS, Marc was a senior director at Moody’s Analytics. He earned his MBA from New York University and his MPA from San Francisco State University.
“This is the second year of returns well below 7.5%. In 2015, CalPERS returned only 2.4%. The cumulative impact will be greater stress on local budgets as cities, counties and special districts will have to increase their pension contributions to make up for the shortfall.”
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The California Policy Center is a non-partisan public policy think tank providing information that elevates the public dialogue on vital issues facing Californians, with the goal of helping to foster constructive progress towards more equitable and sustainable management of California’s public institutions. Learn more at CaliforniaPolicyCenter.org.