Pension Pulse

Michelle Fox of CNBC reports, 'Outright bullish' on the market, money manager says to get into stocks 'right now' : With the stock market about to leave the summer behind, now is the time to buy, according to Jerry Castellini, president and chief investment officer of CastleArk Management. In fact, he told CNBC on Thursday the market can move up 10 percent just to get back to "fuller valuation." "I'm outright bullish," Castellini said on "Power Lunch." He said market watchers have been focusing on the wrong things, such as emerging market weakness, politics and earnings that some worry may have reached their peak. However, Castellini said the global economy is poised to turn . "The consumption around the globe is now following all the liquidity that the central banks have provided these economies. And you're likely to see a continuing higher and higher expectation now for earnings kind of play out," Castell

Andrew Perez and David Sirota wrote an article that was co-published in MapLight, Capital & Main and Fast Company: Ohio, N.J. pension funds invested $625M in hedge fund that controls “National Enquirer” parent : Taxpayers in New Jersey and Ohio have a large financial stake in the owner of the media company that allegedly helped the Trump campaign bury negative stories, according to documents reviewed by Capital & Main and MapLight. Under Republican governors, the two states committed at least $625 million of pension cash into Chatham Asset Management, a high-risk hedge fund that has taken control of the  National Enquirer ‘s parent company, American Media Inc., which is at the center of the federal investigation into President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. California’s pension fund also has a $235 million stake in a Chatham fund. The hedge fund is run by Anthony Melchiorre, a GOP donor who reportedly met with the president and AMI CEO David Pecker at the White H

Knowledge@Wharton recently put out a research comment, The Time Bomb Inside Public Pension Plans : Sanitation workers, firefighters, teachers and other state and local government employees have performed their duties in the public sector for decades with the understanding that their often lackluster salaries were propped up by excellent benefits, including an ironclad pension. But Moody’s Investors Service recently estimated that public pensions are underfunded by $4.4 trillion . That amount, which is equivalent to the economy of Germany , accounts for one-fifth of national debt. It’s a significant concern for public employees who were banking on a fully funded retirement to get them through their golden years. But the issue has wider implications for all taxpayers, who likely will be tapped to make up the shortfall. The Knowledge@Wharton radio show, which airs on  Wharton Business Radio on SiriusXM , asked two experts to explain how governments dug themselves into such a d

Yanis Varoufakis, co-founder of DiEM25 and the former finance minister of Greece, wrote an op-ed for the Guardian, Greece was never bailed out – it remains locked in an EU debtor's prison : Over the past week, the world’s media have been proclaiming the successful completion of the Greek financial rescue programme mounted in 2010 by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Headlines celebrated the end of Greece’s bailout, even the termination of austerity. Buoyant reports from ground zero of the eurozone crisis portrayed Europe’s eight-year long Greek intervention as a paradigm of judicious European solidarity with its black sheep; a case of “tough love” that, reportedly, worked. A more careful reading of the facts points to a different reality. In the very week that a devastated Greece entered another 42 years of harsh austerity and deeper debt bondage (2018-2060), how can the end of austerity and Greece’s regained financial independence be presented as fa

Jonathan Turnbull, Managing Partner at Alignvest Student Housing , sent me a guest comment on insitutional grade student housing investment opportunities in Canada: Student Housing is a specialized segment of the residential real estate sector and is broadly defined to include multi-tenant housing designed to accommodate students enrolled in post-secondary education. Student Housing is a well-known sector to global investors who have invested over $15 billion a year since 2015 acquiring properties all over the world (current year volume expected to be similar). The segment has evolved into a $200 billion market because of two major long-term statistical trends and one fundamental shift in consumer behavior . Major statistical trends: global student enrollment growth far exceeds global population growth because of (a) the growing importance of a post-secondary education and (b) the growth of the global middle class and mobility of international students; and, universities/