The pandemic has handed the funds big losses after they ramped up their appetite for risk over the past decade.
Moody’s investors service estimated that state and local pension funds had lost $1 trillion in the market sell-off ... The exact damage is hard to determine, though, because pension funds do not issue quarterly reports ...
And that data will not count the ... effects of the economic downturn, which would short-circuit pension funds’ ability to hit up taxpayers for bigger contributions ...
“The people have no money,” ...
The coronavirus outbreak could test the sacred nature of these programs in ways that even the crisis of 2008 did not, and ultimately force state and local governments to engage in complicated and perhaps unwinnable fights to reduce or slow the growth of benefits ...
Public pension programs have long been endangered by a fundamental tension: With growing ranks of retirees and mature workers, they should invest conservatively, like someone on the cusp of retirement, shifting into high-quality bonds ...
Instead, they often take on the kind of risk appropriate for someone with decades to go ...
In fact, they’ve taken on even more risk.
As of 2018, state pension funds had on average invested 74 percent of their money in ... risky assets, including stocks, private equities, hedge funds and commodities. That was up from 69 percent in 2010, after the 2008 shock, and from 61 percent in 2001...
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