CalPERS

While we've yet to experience any large municipal pension failures, which is just a matter of 'when' rather than 'if', the small pension failures sprinkled across the state of California are starting to pile up.  As The Sacremento Bee points out today, public workers in Trinity and Imperial counties are just the latest to have their pensions slashed by up to 90% as their cities admit what most of us have known for some time, namely that they're running ponzi schemes which simply don't have the funding required to payout the benefits they've promised. 

In his latest budget proposal, California Governor Jerry Brown, who continues to vehemently pursue various multi-billion dollar pet projects like the high-speed rail and the so-called "Delta Water Fix" despite his state teetering on the brink of insolvency, has finally admitted that CalPERS, California's public pension system, is a total disaster.

Last October we wrote about the unfortunate situation in Loyalton, California whereby CalPERS was threatening to slash pension payments to a group of retired city workers after their City Council members failed to understand basic pension accounting and the unintended consequences of terminating their plan (see "Pension Benefits In Tiny California Town To Be Slashed As "Ponzi Scheme" Is Exposed").  Now it seems as though retirees of the East San Gabriel Valley Human Services Consortium may be facing a similar fate after their former municipal employer failed to pay their pension due

The California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) has just announced that they will be net sellers of $15 billion worth of equities over the next two years.  While the board didn't offer specific market commentary in support of the decision, according to Reuters, Chief Investment Officer Ted Eliopoulos cited market volatility, a 68% funded status and negative cash flow as the key reasons for the shift...we're sure that record high equity valuations on basically every metric ever measured had little to do with the decision. 

In just a couple of months, the largest pension fund in the United States, the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS), will have to decide whether they'll rely on sound financial judgement and math to set their rate of return expectations going forward or whether they'll cave to political pressure to maintain artificially high return hurdles that they'll never meet but help to maintain their ponzi scheme a little longer.  The decision faced by CALPERS is whether their long-term assumed rate of return on assets should be lowered from the cu