This is the last in a three part series. See also Fiduciary Duty to Announce Votes (Part 1): Editorial Calls For Advanced Disclosure and Fiduciary Duty to Announce Votes (Part 2): Historical Background. Take Action: Ask your mutual fund, pension fund, and/or endowment to: Send you a copy of their proxy voting policies and their proxy […]
California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) Chief Executive Officer Jack Ehnes issued the following statement on the Legislature’s announcement of a plan to move forward with legislation, to be amended in Assembly Bill 611, to close the $71 billion CalSTRS funding shortfall: (more…)
Last week I followed up on a proposal made in early 2010 as a result of a couple of resolutions I was able to get enacted through my union in 2009. Yes, these issues take time. You must be tenacious, even when dealing with a fund like CalPERS, where both board and staff want to […]
Hostess In the process of complete liquidation, Hostess essentially admits it robbed the pensions of 18,000 unionized workers and put it toward executive pay for winding down the company. According to AlterNet, Just last month, a judge agreed to let Hostess executives suck another $1.8 million out of the bankrupt company to pay bonuses to […]
As Laura Berry mentioned at the conference, this is an event to recharge your batteries. It is great to learn what others are doing. Of course, the list of things I need to do grows exponentially every time I attend one of these gatherings of mostly California public pension funds. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer: Nothing I […]
Hank Kim, Executive Director and Counsel for the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems (NCPERS), has unveiled a proposal for a new type of retirement plan. To those who think CalPERS and other pensions for public employees should be abandoned, the proposal offers an alternative. See Retirement Security for All. The proposed Secure Choice […]
Hank Kim, Executive Director and Counsel for the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems (NCPERS), has unveiled a proposal for a new type of retirement plan. To those who think CalPERS and pensions for public employees should be abandoned, the proposal offers an alternative. See Retirement Security for All. The proposed Secure Choice Pension (SCP) is aimed at […]
Ten years ago this month I posted a review of Monks, Robert A. G., The New Global Investors: How Shareowners Can Unlock Sustainable Prosperity Worldwide, Capstone Publishing, 2001. “His perspective is that of an aristocratic shareholder activist, not a street demonstrator against the World Trade Organization… Monks appears to believe, and I agree, that corporate control has been […]
The Canadian province of Ontario is scheduled to become the first in the country to oblige its pension plans to publish a Statement of Investment Policies and Procedures (SIPP) and publicly state whether the SIPP takes ESG (environmental, social and governance) issues into account. The SIPP introduction could act as a major boost to the […]
Disclaimer: These are my notes from the second day of a conference of mostly California pension funds. I try, but don’t guarantee accuracy. These notes are very abbreviated and do not cover several speakers. The LA Trustees Roundup keeps getting better every year. If you’re a trustee or even just a member of a public pension […]
Disclaimer: These are my notes from the conference of mostly California pension funds. I’m not a very quick note taker, so I have a tendency to fill in the “gaps” with relevant material from the Internet and with my own interpretation of what where I think the speaker was going. These notes are basically a […]
A recent brief from the National Institute on Retirement Security, Who Killed the Private Sector DB Plan?, finds the following are the main factors that contributed to the decline in private pension funds: Increased regulation, which has had the unintended consequence of impacting both the cash flow of the firm and volatility of plan funding; […]