Category: Retirement

U.K.’s LDI-related turmoil puts spotlight on use of derivatives

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.pionline.com/pension-funds/uks-ldi-related-turmoil-could-spread-experts-say

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Excerpt:

The Bank of England’s emergency bond-buying last week helped shore up U.K. pension funds and threw a spotlight on a popular strategy among corporate plans known as LDI – or liability-driven investing.

Total assets in LDI strategies in the U.K. rose to almost £1.6 trillion ($1.8 trillion) at the end of 2021, quadrupling from £400 billion in 2011, according to the Investment Association, a trade group that represents U.K. managers. Many LDI mandates allow for the use of derivatives to hedge inflation and interest rate risk.

….

Here’s how LDI works: Liability-driven investing is employed by many pension funds to mitigate the risk of unfunded liabilities by matching their asset allocation and investment policy with current and expected future liabilities. The LDI portion of a pension fund’s portfolio utilizes liability-hedging strategies to reduce interest-rate risk, which could include long government and credit bonds and derivatives exposure.

Jeff Passmore, LDI solutions strategist at MetLife Investment Management, said the situation with U.K. pension plans “has been challenging, and the heavy use of derivatives in the U.K. LDI model has made the current situation worse than it would otherwise be.”

While most U.S. LDI portfolios rely on bonds rather than derivatives, ‘”those U.S. plan sponsors who have leaned heavily on derivatives and leverage should take a cautionary lesson from what we’re seeing currently across the Atlantic.”

….

The U.K. pension debacle “is a plain-and-simple problem of leverage,” Charles Van Vleet, assistant treasurer and chief investment officer at Textron, said in an email.

Many U.K. pension plans were interest rate-hedged at 70%, while also holding 60% in growth assets, suggesting 30% leverage, he said. The portfolio’s growth assets have lost around 20% of value if held in public equities and fixed income or about 5% down if held in private equity, he noted.

“Therefore, to make margin calls on their derivative rate exposure they had to sell growth assets – in some cases, selling physical-gilts to meet derivative-gilt margin calls,” Mr. Van Vleet said.

“The problem is worse for plans who gain rate exposure with leveraged ETFs. The leverage in those funds is commonly via cleared interest rate swaps. Margin calls for cleared swaps can only be met with cash – not posted collateral. Therefore, again selling physical-gilts to meet derivative-gilt margin calls.”

Author(s):

BRIAN CROCE
COURTNEY DEGEN
PALASH GHOSH
ROB KOZLOWSKI

Publication Date: 5 Oct 2022

Publication Site: Pensions & Investments

UK Pensions Got Margin Calls

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-09-29/uk-pensions-got-margin-calls

Excerpt:

I said above that pension funds are unusually insensitive to short-term market moves: Nobody in the pension can ask for their money back for 30 years, so if the pension fund has a bad year it won’t face withdrawals and have to dump assets. Still, pension managers are sensitive to accounting. If your job is to manage a pension, you want to go to your bosses at the end of the year and say “this pension is now 5% less underfunded than it was last year.” And if you have to instead say “this pension is now 5% more underfunded than it was last year,” you are sad and maybe fired; if the pension gets too underfunded your regulator will step in. You want to avoid that.

And so the way you will approach your job is something like:

  1. You will try to beat your benchmark, buying stocks and higher-yielding bonds to try to grow the value of your assets.
  2. You will hedge the risk of rates going down. If rates go down, your liabilities will rise (faster than your assets); you are short gilts. You want to do something to minimize this risk.

The way to do that hedging is basically to get really long gilts in a leveraged way. If you have £29 of assets, you might invest them like this:

  1. £24 in gilts,
  2. £5 in stocks, and
  3. borrow another £24 and put that in gilts too.[5] [5] No science to this number, and you’d probably do a bit less if your stocks are correlated with rates.

That way, if rates go down, the value of your portfolio goes up to match the increasing value of your liabilities. So you are hedged. You were short gilts, as an accounting matter, and you’ve solved that by borrowing money to buy more gilts. In practice, the way you have borrowed this money is probably not by actually getting a loan and buying gilts but by doing some sort of derivative (interest-rate swap, etc.) with a bank, where the bank pays you if rates go down and you pay the bank if rates go up. And you have posted some collateral with the bank, and as interest rates move up or down you post more or less collateral. 

This all makes total sense, in its way. But notice that you now have borrowed short-term money to buy volatile financial assets. The thing that was so good about pension funds — their structural long-termism, the fact that you can’t have a run on a pension fund: You’ve ruined that! Now, if interest rates go up (gilts go down), your bank will call you up and say “you used our money to buy assets, and the assets went down, so you need to give us some money back.” And then you have to sell a bunch of your assets — the gilts and stocks that you own — to pay off those margin calls. Through the magic of derivatives you have transformed your safe boring long-term pension fund into a risky leveraged vehicle that could get blown up by market moves.

I know this is bad but I find something aesthetically beautiful about it. If you have a pot of money that is immune to bank runs, over time, modern finance will find a way to make it vulnerable to bank runs. That is an emergent property of modern finance. No one sits down and says “let’s make pension funds vulnerable to bank runs!” Finance, as an abstract entity, just sort of does that on its own.

Anyway, as I said above, 30-year UK gilt rates were about 2.5% this summer. They got to nearly 5% this week, and were at about 3.9% at 9 a.m. New York time today. You can fill in the rest.

Author(s): Matt Levine

Publication Date: 29 Sept 2022

Publication Site: Bloomberg

Bank of England in £65bn scramble to avert financial crisis

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/sep/28/bank-of-england-in-65bn-scramble-to-avert-financial-crisis

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Excerpt:

The Bank of England has been forced into emergency action to halt a run on Britain’s pension funds after the impact of Kwasi Kwarteng’s ill-received mini budget prompted fears of a 2008-style financial crisis.

Threadneedle Street said the fallout from a dramatic rise in government borrowing costs since the chancellor’s statement had left it with no choice but to intervene to protect the UK’s financial system.

City sources said the surprise move, less than a week after Kwarteng’s unfunded tax giveaways, was needed to halt a “doom loop” in the bond markets that risked draining pension funds of cash and leaving them at risk of insolvency.

….

Interest rates on government bonds, or gilts, have risen sharply since the chancellor’s £45bn package of tax cuts – making it punitively expensive for thousands of pensions funds to fund their hedging activities.

Officials in the Financial Services Group of the Treasury were at an away day – said to have been held at the Oval cricket ground in London – on Wednesday, but returned to their desks that afternoon. A source said they were not working on the response to the Bank of England’s announcement.

The Bank’s action helped provide Kwarteng with some respite from the financial markets after three days of turmoil that has seen sterling hit its lowest ever level against the dollar, strong criticism of the mini-budget from the International Monetary Fund, about 1,000 mortgage products pulled and interest rates on UK government bonds hit their highest level since 2008. Bond yields fell while the pound recovered in the currency markets after Threadneedle Street’s announcement.

Author(s): Larry Elliott, Pippa Crerar and Richard Partington

Publication Date: 28 Sep 2022

Publication Site: Guardian

Pension funds crisis forces £65bn bailout by Bank

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/09/28/pension-funds-crisis-forces-65bn-bailout-bank/

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Excerpt:

Britain’s pension funds were on Wednesday at the centre of the financial crisis sparked by the mini-budget forcing the Bank of England to launch a £65 billion emergency bailout. 

The Bank warned of a “material risk to UK financial stability” and stepped in to buy long-term gilts, as plunging markets for UK debt sent borrowing costs spiralling and forced pension funds to dump their assets. Economists compared the crisis to the run of withdrawals that led to the collapse of Northern Rock in the financial crisis. 

However, the move by Governor Andrew Bailey helped restore some calm to markets, and pensions experts said retirement pots were not under threat. Nevertheless, worries that Mr Kwarteng’s radical mini-Budget will trigger further shocks for investors in gilts wiped billions of pounds off the stock market value of Britain’s biggest pension funds.

….

The Bank hopes to halt a domino effect in the City by temporarily suspending plans to offload £80bn of gilts held on its balance sheet. Instead for 13 days it will revert to buying them at a rate of £5bn per day using newly created money in a process known as quantitative easing.

The measures sparked a sharp rally in the market for the 30-year gilts that pension funds had been forced to sell. The cost of such borrowing fell by more than 1 percentage point, a significant downward move. Meanwhile the pound fell initially after the Bank’s announcement on fears of further inflation but recovered to finish roughly flat at nearly $1.09 against the dollar.

Author(s):

Tim Wallace
and
Ben Riley-Smith

Publication Date: 28 Sept 2022

Publication Site: UK Telegraph

Macron buckles on raising France’s retirement age in budget bill

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.ft.com/content/cf3eff53-2dfb-4530-a756-1e1361990d7d

Excerpt:

French president Emmanuel Macron has decided against pushing through a rise in the retirement age to 65 in a budget bill, backing off an idea that had angered labour unions and divided his centrist alliance.

The move signals how Macron has been forced to contend with a stronger opposition in his second term after his party lost its majority in parliament in June.

….

Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne told Agence France-Presse on Thursday that the government would start negotiations with labour unions, employers and other political parties with a view to passing a law over the coming months.

The government still wants to raise the retirement age from 62 at present to 65, one of Macron’s campaign promises that he sees as key to fixing France’s public finances.

Author(s): Leila Abboud

Publication Date: 29 Sept 2022

Publication Site: Financial Times

Late-in-Life Decisions Guide

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.soa.org/resources/research-reports/2022/2022-lil-decisions-guide/

report: https://www.soa.org/497f1c/globalassets/assets/files/resources/research-report/2022/lil-decisions-guide.pdf

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Excerpt:

Much of retirement planning focuses on financial, investment, and estate planning needs. Earlier research,
such as the SOA’s Retirement Health & Happiness brief, showcases how this retirement planning overlooks some challenges of late-in-life retirees.


Retirees have access to more than 200,000 personal finance professionals, 10,000 senior centers, and
approximately 28,000 assisted living facilities. Still, do retirees have all the information they need to make
critical decisions throughout retirement, particularly in the latter stages of retirement?

In collaboration with Financial Finesse, the SOA Aging and Retirement Strategic Research Program
prepared this guide as a resource to help older retirees and those who assist them. This guide will
help the reader ask impactful questions to make informed decisions.

Author(s): SOA Aging and Retirement Strategic Research Program

Publication Date: 2022

Publication Site: Society of Actuaries

Does Aging-In-Place Work? What We Don’t Know Can Hurt Us.

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2022/06/05/does-aging-in-plahttps://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2022/06/05/does-aging-in-place-work-what-we-dont-know-can-hurt-us/ce-work-what-we-dont-know-can-hurt-us/

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Excerpt:

In the book Aging in the Right Place from 2015, author Stephen Golant provides a number of reasons why that “right place” might be the longtime family home:

•The advantages of a familiar neighborhood: the individual knows the shops and services and can navigate the area well even after physical or cognitive decline.

•The advantages of a familiar home: spatial competence (finding your way when the power goes out, navigating steps out of familiarity)

•Preserving familiar relationships – friendships and service providers.

•The attachment to possessions and pets is not disrupted (e.g., vs. moving to no-pets home); the home not only contains memories of the past but also reminders of past successes.

•The home affirms one’s self-worth; one fears (whether rightly or wrongly) that others will consider the person a “retirement failure” upon moving.

….

“The bitter truth is that an older person can succeed at remaining in her or his own home and still live a life as empty and difficult as that experienced by nursing home residents. Feeling compelled to stay in one’s home, no matter what, can result in dwindling choices and mounting levels of loneliness, helplessness, and boredom.”

This is a stark message. But here’s an even more discouraging problem: in my research on the issue, I encountered one repeated refrain. There is no solid scholarly research which asks the question: “which choice is the better one, in terms of future quality of life, to stay or to move?” It’s not an easy question, to be sure: simply looking at the quality of life of the elderly and comparing those who live in single-family homes vs. various kinds of “elder-friendly” housing would not adequately distinguish between those who moved due to some sort of health problem and those who moved with the aim of preventing future health problems, for example.

Publication Date: 5 June 2022

Author(s): Elizabeth Bauer

Publication Site: Forbes

Examining the Teachers Retirement System of Texas after the pension reforms of 2019

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://reason.org/backgrounder/reason-review-trs-after-sb12/

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Excerpt:

TRS currently uses a 7.25% assumed rate of return, which is on the higher end of investment return assumptions among major public systems.

The national average expected rate of return has fallen to 7.0% over the years, with major plans like CalPERS now lowering assumptions into the 6-7% range.

Despite SB12 (2019), with investment returns expected to underperform over the next decade relative to expectations, capping contribution rates in statute creates the perfect conditions for unfunded liabilities to keep accruing just as they have since 2001.

Author(s): Leonard Gilroy, Steven Gassenberger

Publication Date: 3 June 2022

Publication Site: Reason

Millions retired early during the pandemic. Many are now returning to work, new data shows.

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/05/05/retirement-jobs-work-inflation-medicare/

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Excerpt:

Roughly 2.4 million additional Americans retired in the first 18 months of the pandemic than expected, making up the majority of the 4.2 million people who left the labor force between March 2020 and July 2021, according to Miguel Faria-e-Castro, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

The percentage of retirees returning to work has picked up momentum in recent months, hitting a pandemic high of 3.2 percent in March, according to Indeed. In interviews with nearly a dozen workers who recently “un-retired,” many said they felt comfortable returning to work now that they’ve gotten the coronavirus vaccine and booster shots. Almost all said they’d taken on jobs that were more accommodating of their needs, whether that meant being able to work remotely, travel less or set their own hours.

“This is primarily a story of a tight labor market,” said Bunker of Indeed, who added that there was a similar rebound in people returning from retirement after the Great Recession. “For so much of last year, the big question in the labor market was: Where are all the workers? This year we’re seeing that they’re coming back.”

Author(s): Abha Bhattarai

Publication Date: 6 May 2022

Publication Site: WaPo

A chance to enter a new era of financial transparency and awareness for public pension plans

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://reason.org/commentary/a-chance-to-enter-a-new-era-of-financial-transparency-and-awareness-for-public-pension-plans/

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Excerpt:

On Feb. 11, the Actuarial Standards Board issued a revised Actuarial Standard of Practice No. 4, effective February 15, 2023. The rollout has been low-key. The announcement says:

“Notable changes made to the existing 2013 version include expanding the scope to clarify the application of the standard when the actuary selects an output smoothing method and when an assumption or method is not selected by the actuary.”

But this description obscures a significant new required disclosure, one which follows years of controversy and acrimony within and among actuaries and the public pension plan community at large.  The requirement was the overwhelming focus during the drafting and comment period.     

The new required disclosure reflects economic reality better than any currently required number.

Author(s): Larry Pollack

Publication Date: 25 Mar 2022

Publication Site: Reason

Faulty Regulation Blamed for Pension Plans Cutting Investment in Canada

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.theepochtimes.com/faulty-regulation-blamed-for-pension-plans-cutting-investment-in-canada_4474326.html

Excerpt:

Canada’s government acknowledges that the significant investments they seek in Canadian businesses and infrastructure must come mostly from the private sector. But in fact for decades, the country’s pension funds have been considerably reducing their domestic investments, a trend the feds and regulation are being taken to task for.

Tony Loffreda, independent senator from Quebec and former vice chairman of RBC Wealth Management, on May 12 asked the government’s representative in the Senate, Marc Gold, what the feds could do to incentivize Canada’s pension funds to invest more in Canada “without necessarily regulating free enterprise.”

….

The CPPIB’s 2021 annual report showed that in 2006, 64 percent of its assets were invested in Canada and the remaining 36 percent invested globally. But by 2021, the mix had changed to 15.7 percent in Canada and 84.3 percent globally.

….

The report outlined some of the reasons for the trend, singling out regulation.

“Plan sponsors are reacting in very predictable ways to their regulatory environment and the only way to change this behaviour is to change the environment,” LetkoBrosseau said.

It said regulation has over-emphasized short-term fluctuations in asset values, resulting in a shorter investment time horizon for pension fund assets. In contrast, pension savings, which represent 30 percent of Canadian savings, are typically invested for the long term and are meant to be managed such that they can take more risk to earn greater rewards.

Author(s): Rahul Vaidyanath

Publication Date: 18 May 2022

Publication Site: The Epoch Times

Where Does CalSavers Stand?

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.asppa-net.org/news/where-does-calsavers-stand

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Excerpt:

CalSavers, the state-provided retirement plan for employees whose employers do not provide one, was launched on July 1, 2019. Now, more than two and a half years later, where does it stand? 

Registration

Registration was set to take place in three waves: 

  • Wave 1: Employers with more than 100 employees had to register by Sept. 30, 2020. 
  • Wave 2: Employers with 51-100 or more employers had to register by June 30, 2021.
  • Wave 3: Employers with five or more employees must register by June 30, 2022. 

CalSavers has reported that the number of registered employers more than tripled in 2021

Author(s): JOHN IEKEL

Publication Date: 24 Feb 2022

Publication Site: ASPPA