January 2021

26Jan

US. MetLife to Provide Annuity Benefits to Nearly 5,200 Weyerhaeuser Retirees and Beneficiaries

MetLife, Inc. announced today that its subsidiary, Metropolitan Tower Life Insurance Company, has entered into an agreement with Weyerhaeuser Company (Weyerhaeuser) to provide annuity benefits to nearly 5,200 retirees and beneficiaries in Weyerhaeuser’s defined benefit (DB) pension plan, representing pension obligations of approximately $765 million. “We are pleased to have been selected to provide guaranteed lifetime income to these Weyerhaeuser retirees and beneficiaries,” says Graham Cox, executive vice president and head of Retirement & Income Solutions at MetLife. “In...

January 26, 2021
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25Jan

Covid-19 And The Future Of Aging: Technology For Connecting

By Joseph F. Coughlin Milken Institute Center for the Future of Aging: What impacts will the Covid-19 pandemic have on development of technologies that enable older adults to connect with their communities and live independently? Joseph F. Coughlin: By April last year, the nation changed overnight. Work commutes, shopping trips, nights out and visits with friends and family were abruptly halted. We retreated into our homes. Both fear and caution locked us inside. Suddenly, all of us were part of...

January 25, 2021
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23Jan

Biden team to review Labor Department ESG rule

The Biden administration will review a recent Department of Labor rule stipulating that ERISA plan fiduciaries cannot invest in "non-pecuniary" vehicles that sacrifice investment returns or take on additional risk. In his first few hours in office Wednesday, President Joe Biden signed a flurry of executive orders, including one titled "Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle the Climate Crisis." Also Read: US. Multiemployer pension plans could soon see relief In the order, Mr. Biden directed all executive...

January 23, 2021
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22Jan

US. Multiemployer pension plans could soon see relief

Legislation to help struggling multiemployer pension funds is to be introduced Thursday in the House and could be headed for passage if bundled with a COVID-19 relief measure now before Congress. The proposal also calls for some funding relief for single employer plans through extended amortization periods and pension interest rate smoothing changes. The proposed Emergency Pension Plan Relief Act of 2021 is based on similar multiemployer pension reform legislation proposed in the last session of Congress as part...

January 22, 2021
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22Jan

US. Special Report: Why Pennsylvania SERS is Moving Toward a Liability-Driven Benchmark

Seth Kelly, the investment chief at the Pennsylvania State Employees’ Retirement System (SERS), joined the pension fund just half a year ago, but he’s already overseeing some big changes. Board members at the $31.5 billion pension fund last month announced that they are increasing their fixed income allocation in order to move the pension fund toward a liability-driven benchmark. The trustees hope that the changes to the investment policy statement (IPS), including a new 7.8% target for long...

January 22, 2021
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21Jan

Executive Compensation: The Trend Toward One Size Fits All

By Felipe Cabezon This paper reports the prevalence of a “one-size-fits-all” trend in the structure of executive compensation plans. The way firms distribute total compensation across different components of pay –salary, bonus, stock awards, option awards, non-equity incentives, pensions, and perquisites– is becoming more similar since 2006. In particular, 25% of the variation across firms disappeared in the last ten years. Using close votes surrounding Say-on-Pay’s implementation, I find that shareholders’ influence on management decisions causes part of this...

January 21, 2021
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21Jan

Olivia S. Mitchell, PhD: Calibrating Retirement Planning with Current Conditions

By Olivia S. Mitchell In September 2020, Robert Powell, editor-in-chief of the Retirement Management Journal, Jason Fichtner, PhD, senior lecturer at the Johns Hopkins University; and Anna Rappaport, FSA, MAAA, chair of the Society of Actuaries Committee on Post-Retirement Needs and Risks, spoke with Mitchell about how longer lifespans and prolonged retirement periods are requiring adjustments to Social Security benefits, employee pension plans, and individual retirement savings. Source: SSRN

January 21, 2021
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21Jan

US. Pandemic Puts More Households at Risk in Retirement

The National Retirement Risk Index (NRRI), calculated every three years, measures the share of American households that are at risk of not being able to maintain their pre-retirement standard of living in retirement. “Since the Great Recession, the NRRI has shown that even if households work to age 65 and annuitize all their financial assets, including the receipts from reverse mortgages on their homes, roughly half of households are at risk,” according to the Center for Retirement Research at...

January 21, 2021
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18Jan

US. Reforming public pensions

By Nadeem Jeddy Government employees need lifelong incomes to stay independent and promote public interest. Private employees serve no higher cause. Replacing public pensions with traditional defined contribution (DC) schemes like Voluntary Pension System (VPS) and provident funds (PFs) will destroy the security of lifelong incomes. Government employees will be forced to take greater interest in personal finance. New forms of malfeasance will emerge that will be hard to catch and difficult to reverse. A better alternative would be to offer...

January 18, 2021
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15Jan

Why BlackRock’s CEO Says the Retirement Crisis Is Getting Worse

Even as BlackRock’s earnings surged in 2020, with the world’s largest asset manager benefiting from increased saving and investment, the coming retirement crisis in the U.S. is getting worse, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said. Read also Swiss APK designs new climate strategy for investments The three reasons are low interest rates, low savings rates, and more part-timers and self-employed people in the economy. Partly because of the low U.S. household savings rate, Fink said he believed the U.S. has required...

January 15, 2021
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