June 2017

20Jun

US. Ending Pittsburgh’s fossil fuel pension investments wouldn’t be easy or cheap

Researchers say that Pittsburgh's pension funds could lose nearly $500,000 a year if the city stops investing in fossil fuel-related companies — as Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto has said he is committed to doing. While that loss would be damaging for Pittsburgh's underfunded pension funds, it wouldn't do much to change the behavior of fossil fuel companies, the researchers suggest. “It's purely a symbolic move that has no impact on the climate,” said Chris Fiore of the Chicago-based economic consulting firm...

June 20, 2017
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20Jun

US. CalPERS pension fund to review private equity investments

The California Public Employees' Retirement System, or CalPERS, plans to scrutinize its private equity investments at next month's board meeting with an eye toward reviewing the governance and transparency of the asset class. Chief Investment Officer Ted Eliopoulos told the investment board on Monday that despite the high returns of its private equity investments, the negative public scrutiny of the asset class had made "it increasingly difficult for CalPERS to compete successfully in the private equity marketplace." The "fish bowl of...

June 20, 2017
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15Jun

US. Three Ways GOP Is Waging War On Retirement

While most of the world was consumed with former FBI Director James Comey's riveting Senate testimony last week, the GOP majority in the House of Representatives quietly prosecuted its war on retirement. House Republicans under the leadership of Speaker Paul Ryan passed a "Financial CHOICE" Act that would roll back multiple Dodd-Frank protections that were put in place after the 2008 crash. These recent "reforms" mean your retirement savings will be more at risk. U.S. Speaker of the House Rep. Paul...

June 15, 2017
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14Jun

US. Pennsylvania Pension Reform Bill Becomes Law

Pennsylvania’s Senate Bill 1, which moves employees with non-high-risk jobs into hybrid retirement plans, has graduated to a law. Gov. Tom Wolf gave the state pension reform bill the green light Monday. It was passed by the Senate on June 5 and the House of Representatives on June 8. “Today is yet another demonstration that by working across party lines and branches of government, we can address important issues,” Wolf said in a press release. “The common thread that runs through...

June 14, 2017
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09Jun

US. NYC’s Pension Fund Becomes First In Country To Divest From Private Prisons

New York City's pension fund is the first in the nation to fully divest from private prisons, according to Comptroller Scott Stringer. Trustees of the city's pension fund voted unanimously to divest in mid-May, and have since pulled $48 million of stocks and bonds from three companies: GEO Group, CoreCivic, and G4S. "With Donald Trump in the White House, we're seeing more and more industries try to profit from backwards policies at the expense of immigrants and communities of color,"...

June 9, 2017
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06Jun

US. High Court Expands Religious Exemption for Retirement Plans

The exemption in federal pension law for church retirement plans should apply even to plans not initially established by a church, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday. This morning’s reversal stems from class actions against Advocate Health Care Network by current and former employees. Advocate runs 12 hospitals and 250 other health care facilities in Illinois. Though it is not a church, it has contractual relationships with the Metropolitan Chicago Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Illinois...

June 6, 2017
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May 2017

29May

US. Who killed retirement security? If you look closely, it wasn’t the 401(k)

“America’s retirement savings system has failed,” famed financial planning author Jane Bryant Quinn has said — and she isn’t short of company. Media articles regularly recount the ways in which Americans, burdened with the responsibility of saving for retirement through 401(k)s, fail to put enough aside for old age. In response, 84 percent of House Democrats have co-sponsored legislation to expand Social Security benefits, while states are hoping to establish their own retirement plans for private sector workers. But here’s the...

May 29, 2017
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26May

US. A Step Backward in Financial Regulation

The scarring experience of the financial crisis of 2008, and the federal government’s actions to avert widespread chaos in the financial system, remain poorly understood events across the political landscape. Although Congress enacted the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010 to prevent such crises from recurring, some of its provisions reflect that poor understanding. Rather than surgical precision, Dodd-Frank took an inefficient broad-brush approach to making the financial system safer. And despite being overly burdensome, it failed to address a range of...

May 26, 2017
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25May

US. Why tax reform could take away some of the benefits of retirement saving

Retirement saving in typical employer plans – both defined benefit pension and 401(k) plans – is tax advantaged because the government taxes neither the original contribution nor the investment returns until they are withdrawn as benefits at retirement. If the saving were done outside a plan, the individual would first be required to pay tax on their earnings and then on the returns from the portion of those earnings invested. Deferring taxes on the original contribution and on the investment...

May 25, 2017
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25May

A Third of Older Latinos Have Tapped Into Retirement Savings

Suddenly jobless and with small children to support, Jose Victor Camargo without hesitation cashed out a retirement account he had with his former employer. That was more than a decade ago, and the father of three used the money to pay for rent and stay afloat until he found another job. "We are always in need, so I used the money," he said in Spanish. "We were struggling. We tried to make the money stretch." An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public...

May 25, 2017
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