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Back in the summer of 2012 the City of Los Angeles realized that they had a serious budget problem on their hands and the culprit, as in so many other cities, was the city’s extremely generous pension plan for municipal workers. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, backed by the city council, jumped into the fray and passed what was then described as sweeping pension reform and patted themselves on the back for a job well done. (LA Times, 2012) Despite a raucous protest and threats of a lawsuit from city labor unions, the Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to roll...

The company said the move is an alignment with industry trends in which fewer companies offer pensions. WILMINGTON, Del. -- The DuPont Company said it will eliminate its pension contribution for active employees. ... active employees will no longer accrue additional benefits, and employees under age 50 also will no longer receive dental, medical and life insurance benefits in retirement. ... Since 1998, nearly one-quarter of all Fortune 500 companies have stopped contributing to employees' primary pension plans, and 40 percent offer only a 401(k).

At an event sponsored by the West Michigan Policy Forum, Nick Ciaramitaro of Michigan AFSCME Council 25 criticized defined contribution retirement plans. They are, he argued, more expensive than defined benefit plans for the same benefit, creating a “lose-lose situation.” He is wrong — letting employees control their own retirement accounts would lower costs and give them control over their own retirement. Pension plans in governments are expensive yet are not especially generous. The risk of underfunding adds an expense to them that is not present in defined contribution plans. Most of the money going into pension funds is not...

Billions in unfunded obligations in the South Carolina pension funds for state and local government workers, teachers and police officers are “a freight train out of control,” a state representative said Tuesday. The unfunded obligations of the largest of those pension funds, the S.C. Retirement System, are expected to grow by $1.4 billion over the next year, according to actuarial firm Gabriel Roeder Smith and Co. That system serves more than 180,000 state and local government employees, including teachers. Another 134,634 retirees also are part of the system. The Retirement System has about $24 billion in assets, according to the...

The Civil War ended more than 150 years ago, but the U.S. government is still paying a veteran's pension from that conflict. "One beneficiary from the Civil War [is] still alive and receiving benefits," Randy Noller of the Department of Veterans Affairs confirms. Irene Triplett – the 86-year-old daughter of a Civil War veteran – collects $73.13 each month from her father's military pension. The identity of Triplett was first reported by The Wall Street Journal in 2014.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Wednesday called for a new tax on city water and sewer bills to stabilize the city's largest pension fund, a move he portrayed as his latest tough decision to secure Chicago's financial future. Emanuel's plan, which would increase the average water and sewer bill by 30 percent over the next four years, was quickly met with resistance from some aldermen who argued the city would be better off adding business taxes or even raising property taxes again to come up with the hundreds of millions of dollars a year needed to keep the city's municipal workers'...

Japan’s $1.3 trillion Government Pension Investment Fund lost 3.8 percent in the year ended March 31, or 5.3 trillion yen ($51 billion), the retirement manager said Friday in Tokyo. That’s the biggest drop since the fiscal year ended March 31, 2009. GPIF lost 10.8 percent on domestic equities and 9.6 percent on shares in other markets, while Japanese bonds handed the fund a 4.1 percent gain.

Cities across Michigan and the nation are struggling to pay out their promised pensions. Retiree liabilities were a root cause of Detroit's bankruptcy before a grand bargain trimmed benefits and required the city to set its pensions on a path toward solvency. Here are six numbers that explain the pension problems in Michigan’s largest city and what is being done going forward. 1. Nine Years – That’s how long Detroit could fund its entire transportation system with the money it will spend on its pension bankruptcy settlement. According to Detroit’s 2015 audit, transportation costs the city $100 million per year....

California’s largest public pension fund made a return of less than 1% in its most recent fiscal year, the fund’s worst performance since 2009. The California Public Employees’ Retirement System said Monday that its rate of return for the year ended June 30 was just 0.61%. What’s more, Ted Eliopoulos, the pension fund’s chief investment officer, said the poor year has pushed CalPERS’ long-term returns below expected levels. “We have some challenges to confront,” Eliopoulos said during a conference call. “We’re moving into a much more challenging, low-return environment.” CalPERS assumes that, in the long-term, it will earn investment returns...

Almost 55 months after confessing felonious conduct, Teamster money-laundering scandal figure, Jere Nash, has finally been sentenced. U.S. Dist. Judge Thomas P. Griesa (S.D.N.Y., Nixon) sentenced Nash Apr. 9 to a mere two years probation for his role in a series of schemes which lead to the embezzlement of some $885,000 from the Int'l Bhd. of Teamsters' treasury and to $538,100 in illegal campaign contributions to the failed reelection campaign of expelled IBT president Ron Carey. The sentencing appears to have been hush hush: the four N.Y.C. major dailies and the two Washington, D.C., dailies apparently did not cover the...

Unlike Washington D.C., Michigan’s state government is constitutionally prohibited from spending more than it takes in each year and borrowing to make up the difference. Yet state taxpayers are still liable for large amounts of state debt, for purposes both practical and problematic. The debts of greatest concern to residents are general obligation bonds, backed by general taxpayer dollars. Payments come right out of the annual general fund tax revenue the state uses to support the rest of what it does. Michigan’s recently passed budget includes $137 million to make payments on this debt, paid from state’s general fund (largely...

SAN FRANCISCO (KTVU) -- The San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved a measure that would ban the city employee retirement system from investing in companies that participate in firearm and ammunition manufacturing. The resolution by the supervisors could have a ripple effect throughout the country as the debate about gun control grows in the wake of a mass shooting in Orlando two weeks ago at a gay nightclub that left 50 people dead and several others injured. San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee is trying to gather support nationwide by asking the mayors of both Boston and New York...

Chicago homeowners should brace themselves for sticker shock when they open their mailbox at the end of the month: property tax bills on average 13 percent higher than last year. The big increase is mostly being driven by the record tax increase Mayor Rahm Emanuel engineered last fall to fix city pension funds for police officers and firefighters. Cook County Clerk David Orr released tax rate figures Monday, revealing the practical effects of City Hall's painful decision. The owner of a single-family home with the current average sale price of about $225,000 can expect to see a property tax bill...

Denver Public Schools has quietly put the rest of its controversial variable-rate bonds with swaps on the market to sell as fixed-rate debt. Five years after issuing a 30-year, $750 million school pension bond that turned into a financial quagmire for the district, DPS is selling $519.8 million in fixed-rate, refunding certificates of participation (COPs), set to price during the week of April 15, according to an announcement Friday from Fitch Ratings. ... DPS "fixed out" — or issued debt at a fixed interest rate — half of the original $750 million in debt in 2011, and paid nearly $42...

Contaminated drinking water has dominated daily headlines in Flint, but a looming crisis of a different kind casts a pall over the city’s financial future: A $285 million unfunded pension liability is consuming ever more of the city’s budget. In 2015, Flint paid $20.4 million to cover retirement system costs. To put the burden of pension obligations into perspective, that amount is 42 percent of the city's general fund budget. The financial stress has been growing: In 2010 Flint paid just $13.4 million into this system. The general fund represents just one part of the city’s budget (the water and...

For the sixth year in a row, Michigan officials failed to pay the full amount the state's own experts say is required to adequately fund the school employee pension system. In addition to the risks associated with adding to the billions in unfunded liabilities the system has already accumulated, this is also imposing more stress on local school budgets. According to rules of a defined benefit pension system, the state is supposed to contribute an amount called the “annual requirement contribution,” or ARC, into the Michigan Public School Employees Retirement System (MPSERS) every year. For 2015, actuarial accountants say that...

the public pension debt for the 50 states and the District of Columbia jumped 84 percent in recent years, from $2.625 trillion in 2008 to $4.833 trillion in 2014. ... The highest pension debt/household is in Alaska, with an estimated $113,137 figure; Illinois and California are in the second and third highest rankings at more than $77,000 per household.” The lowest state pension debt per household is in Tennessee at $17,761. Illinois has the lowest “market funded ratio” (value of pension assets divided by market liability), at 23.3 percent. The other 49 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. have a market...

This is the first of a two-part series on the Central States pension fund. The second part looks more closely into why its investment performance suffered. Real estate investments in Las Vegas casinos and hotels once threatened the integrity of a Teamsters pension fund that the federal government wrested away from corrupt trustees and organized crime after five years of legal battles. A quarter-century later, the professionals who replaced them—Central States Pension Fund administrators; the Goldman Sachs & Co. and Northern Trust Global Advisors fiduciaries; and Department of Labor regulators—stood watch while the financial markets accomplished what the mob had...

"... One new idea that has not yet been proposed is for Congress to empower states to have the ability to reform their insolvent pension plans. Such legislation would pre-empt state laws that prohibit states from making necessary reforms. It would allow pension reform laws passed by state assemblies to take effect. ..."

A dark storm is brewing in the world of private pensions, and all hell could break loose when it finally hits. As the Washington Post reports, the Central States Pension Fund, which handles retirement benefits for current and former Teamster union truck drivers across various states including Texas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri, New York, and Minnesota, and is one of the largest pension funds in the nation, has filed an application to cut participant benefits, which would be effective July 1 2016, as it "projects" it will become officially insolvent by 2025. In 2015, the fund returned -0.81%, underperforming the 0.37%...