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State of the Pensions: Oregon  

by meep

Yes, my blogging has been lighter of late (lots of real life stuff for me to do, including grading actuarial exams), but there has been a lot of pension-related activity, and especially public pensions. I may not blog it here, but I sure do update my watch threads at

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Teachers Appreciation Week: Public Teacher Mortality  

by meep

Okay, before I begin. A few videos I did on my favorite teachers:

• On Dr. John Kolena, my high school physics teacher
• Mr. Dan Teague, who taught me about applied math
• Dr. Sue Collins who gave me and told me about opportunities in math

Those are all positive. In case you...

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Teacher Pensions: A Big Problem for Many States  

by meep

For Teacher Appreciation Week, I made a video about my favorite teacher: give it a watch. That video is all positive.

What I have below is not.

TEACHER PENSIONS ARE A PROBLEM BECAUSE THERE ARE SO MANY

Teacher pensions are a huge problem for...

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Divestment and ESG Follies: Where's My Dark Money?  

by meep

Not only divestment.

But yes, a lot of divestment.

Harvard Activists Call for Fossil Fuel Divestment

Harvard University students, faculty, and alumni marked Earth Day by kicking of a week of climate-related rallies and calling on the university’s $39.2 billion endowment to eliminate fossil fuel-related companies from its investment portfolio.

Divest Harvard, a...

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Others Notice That A Long Bull Market Hasn't Improved Public Pension Fundedness  

by meep

I knew you’d get there eventually, y’all!

I saw it both in the WSJ and Pensions&Investment news, and the WSJ piece is somewhat reasonable…. but the P&I bit is something else.

WALL STREET JOURNAL COVERAGE: JUST THE FACTS, MA’AM

I first saw it on...

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Divestment and ESG Follies...and Heroes: YAY for President of Brown University, Oil, and Private Prisons  

by meep

It’s been about 3 weeks since my last divestment-related post, so let me dump a bunch here. There was actually quite a few good results.

Brown University President Rejects Israel Divestment

Brown University’s president has rejected a student-approved referendum calling for the university to divest from companies that conduct business...

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An Ugly Interest Rate Environment and Public Pensions Chasing Returns  

by meep

The Federal Reserve Open Markets Committee (FOMC) had a meeting this past week, and the reactions have been ugly.

This is what I mean by ugly: a yield curve inversion.

The x-axis is years, and the y-axis is the percent rate.

What that graph shows is that the 1-month to...

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Around the Pension-o-Sphere: Jane the Actuary, ESG, California Rule, and More  

by meep

I haven’t done one of these in a while, but I’ve built up a bunch of links in my Actuarial Outpost Public Pensions Watch (for 2019), as well as my other pension watch threads, and thought you might be interested in some of the themes I’ve come across.

Most of...

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Chicago Mayoral Race: Screwed No Matter Who You Choose, Thanks to Unfunded Pensions  

by meep

So, I wander onto twitter about once a day, and sometimes I engage, and many times I don’t.

I noticed something from one of the mayoral candidates, Lori Lightfoot. Remember how I said she wasn’t as bad as Preckwinkle? I still think that’s true, from a practical standpoint of how...

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Pritzker's Plan for Illinois Pensions: "Clever" Tricks - POBs, Pay More Later, and Asset Transfer  

by meep

Sigh.

Well, if you’re going to go for the gold, you may as well throw in all the clever tricks.

I will grab from Wirepoints about the main “clever” ideas.

The administration will pursue three of the worst ideas available:

• First, the state will borrow to pay off pension debt by...

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