Pension Pulse

Fred Imbert and Yun Li report the Dow drops 200 points, S&P 500 and Nasdaq fall for third straight week:Stocks fell on Friday to end a volatile week as investors continued to dump shares of high-flying tech companies. The Dow Jones Industrial Average slid 370 points, or more than 1%. The S&P 500 dropped 1.7% and the Nasdaq Composite fell 2.2%. Those losses put the major averages on track for their third straight one-week losses, which would be their longest weekly losing streaks in about a year. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq were down more than 1% each week to date; the Dow has lost 0.3% in that time. The S&P 500 also hit its lowest level this month after reaching an all-time high on Sept. 2.Shares of Apple dropped more than 3%. Microsoft and Alphabet also pulled back by more than 3% along with Amazon. Netflix slipped 2.3%. Facebook was down by 1.5%. Oracle, meanwhile, slipped 1.1% after the U.S. government said it will block all TikTok and WeChat downloads in the …

Kevin Skerrett, a Senior Research Officer assigned to pensions for CUPE and co-editor of The Contradictions of Pension Fund Capitalism (2018), wrote a comment in The Bulltet on pension fund capitalism and the COVID-19 pandemic: the case of Revera:Of the many crises provoked by the COVID-19 pandemic across Canada, the dire situation in long-term care facilities and retirement housing may be the most widely and urgently recognized. Even Ontario Premier Doug Ford, whose own party engineered the significant shift to more privatized and ‘marketized’ long-term care (LTC) provision in the 1990s, recently declared the system to be “absolutely broken.” A scathing report prepared by Canadian military specialists sent by the Ontario government to provide emergency staff support to five (eventually six) of the province’s worst-hit homes described the conditions found as “gruesome.” A subsequent report from the Canadian Institute for Health Research (CIHI) found that Canada has had the hi…

Ioannis Segounis, founder of Athos Investment Services, wrote a guest comment for me on why pensions need a chief performance officer:
What is the most focused on and talked about subject in the investment industry? Performance, and yet this industry still lacks the role of a chief performance officer (CPO).
Although all companies can benefit from one, the Pension Fund sector of the industry stands to benefit the most. Pension Funds differ from other investment firms in that their objective is to meet the pension obligations of their beneficiaries. The actual benchmark for every pension fund is the ability to meet all pension liabilities and not some broad market index. Furthermore, the pension boards overseeing these funds exist to protect the interests of the beneficiaries and to play a critical role in ensuring the best management is in place. In terms of governance, pension funds resemble for the most part other investment firms with a CEO leading the firm, a CIO in charge of str…