Pension Pulse

Tom DiChristopher of CNBC reports, Millennials face 'Great Depression' in retirement: Blackstone COO : Americans in their 20s and 30s are facing a retirement crisis that could plunge them back into the Great Depression, Blackstone President and Chief Operating Officer Tony James said Wednesday. "Social Security alone cannot provide enough for these people to retain their standard of living in retirement, and if we don't do something, we're going to have tens of millions of poor people and poverty rates not seen since the Great Depression," he told CNBC's "Squawk Box." The solution is to help young people save more by mandating savings through a Guaranteed Retirement Account system, he said. Right now, young people cannot save enough on their own because they face stagnant incomes and heavy student-debt burdens. The Guaranteed Retirement Account was proposed by labor economist Teresa Ghilarducci in 2007 as a solution to the problem of r...

Jeff Cox of CNBC reports, Hedge funds see worst year since financial crisis : Hedge fund performance over the past three months hearkened back to the bad old days of the financial crisis. Poor performance weighed heavily on the industry, causing the biggest net loss in capital since the fourth quarter of 2008, according to data released Tuesday by HFR. The $95 billion decline pushed total industry assets further from the vaunted $3 trillion mark. As measured by the HFRI Fund Weighted Composite Index, the industry saw a 3.9 percent performance drop in the third quarter, taking the barometer into negative territory for the year at minus 1.5 percent. At this pace, hedge funds will turn in their worst performance year since 2011. The bright side is that the industry actually outperformed the equity market through the end of the quarter, as the S&P 500 fell more than 6 percent through the first nine months. The S&P has since rebounded, jumping 5.6 percent in October to p...

Last week, Keith Leslie of the Globe and Mail reported, Wynne says Ontario may drop pension plan if Liberals win election : Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne suggested Tuesday that her government would drop the idea of a provincial pension plan if Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau becomes the next prime minister. Wynne couldn’t convince the Harper government to enhance the Canada Pension Plan, so her Liberal government introduced an Ontario Retirement Pension Plan that would mirror the CPP, essentially doubling deductions and benefits. If Trudeau wins the Oct. 19 election and is willing to improve the CPP, that would address her concerns about people without a workplace pension plan not having enough money to live on when they retire, said Wynne. “If we have a partner in Justin Trudeau to sit down and work out what they’re looking at as an enhancement to CPP, that was always my starting point, that was the solution,” she said. Trudeau is campaigning on a promise to expand the CPP...

Michael Moritz, chairman of Sequoia Capital, wrote a very critical opinion piece for the Financial Times, The subprime ‘unicorns’ that do not look a billion dollars : The private and public worlds of technology collided this week with a set of stories about two very different companies: one a large business in its fourth decade, seeking to adjust to a new world; the other a much touted Silicon Valley start-up whose ambitious scientific claims were questioned in a devastating newspaper article . The former, Dell, and the latter, Theranos, illustrate the benefits and perils of life as a private company. Michael Dell had experienced many years as the head of a publicly traded company, which included some close encounters of the worst kind and a bruising battle with some dissident shareholders, before delisting in a leveraged buyout in 2013. Since then, relieved from the merciless roasting of the quarterly earnings call, he has had the freedom to undertake a long-term ...