Free Republic

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) for state employees lost 71 percent of a $468 million private equity investment into clean energy. Because CalPERS pension benefits are only 79 percent funded, the California taxpayer and state government have to make up for the other 21 percent. With a high pension shortfall of $180 billion, CalPERS’ investment strategies into private equity have come under scrutiny, per The Center Square: CalPERS committed $465 million to the private equity CalPERS Clean Energy & Technology Fund (CETF) in 2007, ultimately paying in $468,423,814. Since then, the cash out and remaining investment value of...

The New York State Common Retirement Fund has sued BP over losses, according to preliminary wire reports. State comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, who is the fund trustee, announced he had hired Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC to represent the Fund in a class action against BP Plc. DiNapoli said he is seeking to lead the class action against BP to give the Fund and other investors their best chance at recovering damages sustained from the decline in shareholder value subsequent to the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill. DiNapoli said the Fund held more than 19M shares at the time...

A new tax law will allow retirees to skip required withdrawals from individual retirement accounts and related accounts this year [2009]. The change -- signed into law by President Bush last month -- is intended to give beaten-down nest eggs time to rebound from the brutal bear market. ~snip~ The new law suspends required distributions in 2009. This gives those who can afford to leave their nest eggs alone a better chance of recovering some of the investment losses they sustained last year. "They'll have more dollars working for them in the event of a stock-market rebound," says Elizabeth Drigotas,...

Raiding the Retirement Stash By Michelle Singletary Sunday, July 20, 2008; Page F01 Would you still put money in a tax-advantaged retirement fund if you couldn't touch it until you retired? And when I say you couldn't touch it, I mean you couldn't take out loans or withdraw funds under any circumstances. If Congress were rewriting the rules for 401(k) s and similar retirement plans, that's what the Washington-based Pension Rights Center would recommend. Why this hard stance from a consumer-oriented group that works hard to protect and promote retirement savings? A new study found that an increasing number of...