Pension Pulse

Benefits Canada reports, Ivanhoé Cambridge, Oxford Properties team up to buy U.S. logistics real estate developer : The real estate investing arms of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec and the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System are teaming up to invest in the U.S.-based IDI Logistics. “We are delighted to be working with Oxford on this venture for the future success of IDI Logistics, a company which consistently builds, operates and leases some of the best bulk-and-big-box logistics real estate in the United States,” said Mario Morroni, executive vice-president of industrial for North America at Ivanhoé Cambridge, in a press release. “This transaction perfectly illustrates our plan to capture the growth in demand for logistics globally, which includes a meaningful increase of our investments in that sector across four continents.” In just over two years, Ivanhoé Cambridge has grown its investments in the industrial and logistics sector by about seven billio...

Randy Diamond of ai-CIO reports, CalSTRS Wants to Double Co-Investments : The investment staff of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) wants to double the number of co-investments in the system’s approximate $18 billion private equity program in the next two to five years, adding 15 new staffers and possibly opening an office in San Francisco to handle the additional investments. The West Sacramento-based pension’s plan to build its private equity program is contained in agenda material for its January 30 investment committee meeting. The investment committee is being asked to approve CalSTRS’s strategic direction in efforts to expand the private equity program, the pension system’s best-producing asset class over the short and long term . CalSTRS’s overall private equity returns for the one-year period ending March 31 totaled 15.5%, the largest return of any asset class. CalSTRS currently has 8.1% of its overall portfolio devoted to private equity, b...

Eric Boehm of Reason reports, Can Public Pensions Survive the Next Recession? : A decade of consistent economic growth lifted the major stock market indices to all-time highs in 2018. But even before the recent dip, many state pension plans were struggling to get back to where they were before the last recession. Unfunded pension debt across the 50 states totals a staggering $1.6 trillion, even by the plans' own (often overly rosy) accounting . If a decade of positive investment returns can't fix what's wrong with America's public pension systems, how much worse could things get in the event of another downturn? That's what Greg Mennis, Susan Banta, and David Draine, three researchers at the Harvard Kennedy School, set out to determine. They subjected state pension plans to a series of stress tests meant to simulate the consequences of a variety of adverse economic climates over the next two decades, including everything from another major recession to merely...

Catherine Clifford of CNBC reports, Hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio: ‘Capitalism basically is not working for the majority of people’ : With just over $18 billion to his name, capitalism has been good to Ray Dalio: He started his hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, out of a two-bedroom New York City apartment in 1975 and it now manages $160 billion in assets and is the largest hedge fund in the world, according to Forbes . Quite literally, Dalio has built a fortune thanks to capitalism. But he’s also keenly aware that it is a deeply flawed system. “Capitalism basically is not working for the majority of people. That’s just the reality,” Dalio said at the 2018 Summit conference in Los Angeles in November. Monday, Dalio tweeted a video of his Summit talk. Really enjoyed @Summit LA last fall and the great crowd there. If you’re interested, you can watch my full talk here: https://t.co/m4iluAL1E3 pic.twitter.com/enrTA4bKJn — Ray Dalio (@RayDalio) January 14, 2019 D...