How far do you have to get into the Little Hoover Commission report on pension reform to start questioning its results?<\/p>\n
How about the graph on page ii that shows the percentage of funding of major pension funds in California.<\/p>\n
It looks pretty bad, but then when you look closely, the numbers just don’t look right.<\/p>\n
CalPERS, the last time I looked, had around 230 billion dollar invested in a broad portfolio of assets, but the handy chart that shows that CALPers is only 61% funded has a value on the graph that looks like it’s around 180 billion.<\/p>\n
A quick check of the footnotes shows that the chart was based on numbers from the end of the fiscal year 2008-2009, not the most recent fiscal year.<\/p>\n
How important is that? <\/p>\n
Well, the value of CALPers investments as of June 30th, 2009 was $178.9 billion. By the date that the Little Hoover report was released, that number had increased by 50 billion dollars<\/i>. Even using numbers from the end of FY 09-10 would have been much more honest, but the rebound from market bottoms is only mentioned in passing in the body of the report.<\/p>\n
This is not a trivial difference, and CALPers is not unique in posting large gains since the market bottom. CALStrs is the second largest pension fund in the state and covers teachers and community college professors. Since March 2009, when markets bottomed after a global financial Great Recession, the CalSTRS investment portfolio has rebounded by more than $34.8 billion to $146.4 billion.<\/p>\n
Little Hoover = Big Lie.<\/p>\n
More on this later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How far do you have to get into the Little Hoover Commission report on pension reform to start questioning its results?<\/p>\n
How about the graph on page ii that shows the percentage of funding of major pension funds in California.<\/p>\n
It looks pretty bad, but then when you look closely, the numbers just don’t look right.<\/p>\n
CalPERS, the last time I looked, had around 230 billion dollar invested in a broad portfolio of assets, but the handy chart that shows that CALPers is only 61% funded has a value on the graph that looks like it’s around 180 billion.<\/p>\n
A quick check of the footnotes shows that the chart was based on numbers from the end of the fiscal year 2008-2009, not the most recent fiscal year.<\/p>\n
How important is that? <\/p>\n
Well, the value of CALPers investments as of June 30th, 2009 was $178.9 billion. By the date that the Little Hoover report was released, that number had increased by 50 billion dollars<\/i>. Even using numbers from the end of FY 09-10 would have been much more honest, but the rebound from market bottoms is only mentioned in passing in the body of the report.<\/p>\n
This is not a trivial difference, and CALPers is not unique in posting large gains since the market bottom. CALStrs is the second largest pension fund in the state and covers teachers and community college professors. Since March 2009, when markets bottomed after a global financial Great Recession, the CalSTRS investment portfolio has rebounded by more than $34.8 billion to $146.4 billion.<\/p>\n
Little Hoover = Big Lie.<\/p>\n
More on this later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2388,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[2213,783,23],"class_list":["post-13184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-2213","tag-783","tag-23"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pvhz-3qE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2388"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}