NY Times - Pensions - Detroit

On July 20, 2013 Mary Williams Walsh wrote the following highlighted article in the NY Times concerning the newly discovered deficit in the two Detroit municipal pension plans and the city's pending bankruptcy action. Ms. Walsh has written many pension articles in the past. Like most commentators on public pension plan issues, however, she never addresses the whole picture. Not that what she reports is necessarily incorrect but that it is incomplete.

For the record, the one issue I never hear reported is the miserable investment performance of public pension plans and how much this contributes to pension underfunding. There are also many questionable investment decisions that the NY Times never reports. It's a great newspaper but it's not always on the cutting edge.

In this article Ms. Walsh points out a sudden increase in Detroit's reported pension underfunding and lays a large amount of blame at the door of widespread actuarial practices which have lead to long term shortfalls on employers' contributions to most public pension systems around the country.

This is a valid and accurate statement but it is not a secret. Everyone in the public pension community knows that the plan actuaries have not been providing good numbers for a long time. Their chief sin has been the use of investment targets that are far to high. This has systematically lead to underfunding of the plans. It has also lead to reckless investment strategies adopted by plan trustees trying to hit the unrealistic targets. It also created the excuse to hire investment firms with outrageous fee structures.

Generally actuaries are very bright mathematicians but like all of us they are usually short on courage. No one wants to lose his/her job. That is what would happen if an actuary came in with the real numbers. So, they do what most of us would do. They bend and twist to keep the parties with power happy.

Below is an extract from Ms. Walsh's article that describes this problem. Towards the end of the extract Ms. Walsh mentions a "Blue Ribbon Panel" set up by the Society of Actuaries which was formed to look into how to address the reputational risks that "bad" numbers were creating. One of the panel members that she idnetifies is Robert North, the NYCERS and NYCTRS actuary. North has a questionable history on his own interest rate assumptions for the city pension funds. I listed below the interest rate changes he has recommended while working for NYCERS. Walsh doesn't seem to be aware of the inconsistency in having North on this panel.

This made me do a little homework. I checked the Society of Actuaries web site and listed all the panel names below. One of the names that Walsh did not identify was Mike Musuraca. For many years Musuraca worked for DC-37, a municipal union with a recent history of corruption while he was working there. He represented DC-37 on the NYCERS Board of Trustees for investment issues. In 2009 he went work for a private equity firm, Blue Wolf Capital, but not before he voted to hire Blue Wolf as private equity firm for NYCERS. Here is a little more background on Blue Wolf Blue Wolf.

When someone like Walsh has these issues in front of her and she doesn't address them, you wonder whether she serious about the problem.

Extract from NY Times article, July 20, 2013

But that is not what happens. To calculate a city’s pension liabilities, an actuary instead projects all the contributions the city will probably have to make to the pension fund over time. Many assumptions go into this projection, including an assumption that returns on the investments made by the pension fund will cover most of the plan’s costs. The greater the average annual investment returns, the less the city will presumably have to contribute. Pension plan trustees set the rate of return, usually between 7 percent and 8 percent.

...

A few years ago, with the debate still raging and cities staggering through the recession, one top professional body, the Society of Actuaries, gathered expert opinion and realized that public pension plans had come to pose the single largest reputational risk to the profession. A Public Plans Reputational Risk Task Force was convened. It held some meetings, but last year, the matter was shifted to a new body, something called the Blue Ribbon Panel, which was composed not of actuaries but public policy figures from a number of disciplines. Panelists include Richard Ravitch, a former lieutenant governor of New York; Bradley Belt, a former executive director of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation; and Robert North, the actuary who shepherds New York City’s five big public pension plans.

The commplete list of members of the Blue Ribbon Panel

Chair: Bob Stein, FSA, MAAA, Retired, Ernst & Young
Co-Vice Chair: Andrew Biggs, American Enterprise Institute
Co-Vice Chair: Douglas Elliott, Brookings Institution
Bradley Belt, Palisades Capital Management, former executive director of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation
David Crane, Stanford University, former advisor to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, CA
Malcolm Hamilton, FSA, FCIA, Retired, Mercer, senior Fellow, C. D. Howe Institute
Laurence Msall, The Civic Federation (Illinois)
Mike Musuraca, Blue Wolf Capital Partners, former trustee of the NYC Employees Retirement Systems-NYCERS and formerly of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees
Bob North, FSA, EA, MAAA, FCA, FSPA, New York City Office of the Actuary
Richard Ravitch, Co-chair, State Budget Crisis Task Force, formerly Lt. Governor of New York
Larry Zimpleman, FSA, MAAA, Principal Financial Group

Assumed Interest Rate History under Robert North (1990 to 2013)

1. 7/1/1995 9.0% to 8.75%
2. 7/1/1999 8.75% to 8.0%
3. 7/1/2011 8.0% to 7.0% (net of fees)

I don't have the documentation describing the origin of the 9% rate and my memory is a bit weak that far back. It is quite possible, however, that North also make the recommendation for 9%.