Private credit has become a popular asset class among pension plan sponsors seeking yield enhancement over their public fixed income allocations. The non-bank finance market has flourished since the Global Financial Crisis due to a more restrictive bank regulatory environment, resulting in reduced bank lending activity, and a wide range of private credit opportunities are […]
July 2023
Saving on Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) premiums has long been at the forefront of many pension risk management decisions. When interest rates were near historic lows during 2019 and 2020, many single-employer plan sponsors changed their methodology for calculating these premiums to reduce their tax obligation to the federal government. Although it appeared like […]
July 2023
Over the past four decades, institutional investors have implemented newer and more dynamic strategies in their portfolios in an effort to boost investment returns. During the same period, many investors reduced allocations to fixed income while increasing allocations to equities and alternative investments, including private investments (PI), hedge funds, and commodities. Private equity (PE) investments […]
May 2023
Private equity (PE) secondary funds can provide several benefits to investors, including an accelerated pace of distributions relative to traditional primary PE fund investments. In addition, they can help investors enter new strategies, access top managers, and reduce blind pool risk. In this piece, we review secondary funds and their benefits by answering seven key […]
May 2023
What a difference a year makes. In the second half of 2021, investors were talking about a potential prolonged Goldilocks market. By year-end 2022, the Bloomberg US Aggregate Bond Index had posted its worst annual return on record and the S&P 500 had experienced a substantial pullback from recent historical highs. Amid this turbulence, pension […]
March 2023
Regulations are often controversial, but few in recent history have had so many different interpretations and large revisions as the Special Financial Assistance (SFA) program for underfunded multiemployer pension plans (MEPP). Now that the dust has settled, one of the biggest risks for plan sponsors is not taking full advantage of the opportunities that are […]
February 2023
The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA) included substantial relief funds for the most troubled US multiemployer pension plans through its Special Financial Assistance (SFA) program. The SFA program was created to help seriously underfunded multiemployer pension plans maintain solvency through 2051. Multiemployer pension plans receiving SFA funds now have a unique opportunity to […]
November 2022
Most defined benefit plans—including public, multi-employer, and even frozen corporate plans—can benefit from private investment (PI) strategies. It is fairly common knowledge that private investments offer important value in the form of increased expected investment returns, and that they can be instrumental in improving funded status and achieving other plan goals. Despite this, many plan […]
September 2022
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Managing Director, Pension Practice