It’s time to put to rest David Crane’s argument that public-pension funds, including CalPERS, are not fully disclosing pension liabilities. This is far from the truth and it’s irresponsible of Crane, or anyone else for that matter, to misuse this information to scare the taxpaying public and policymakers. His claims are based on two fatal flaws. First, the Stanford study cited by Crane and commissioned by his former boss — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger — uses a much lower assumed investment return rate by assuming that pension funds invest in only low-interest, risk-free bonds, thus artificially producing higher liabilities. It ignores our diversified investment portfolio that has earned us an average annual investment return of 7.9 percent for the last 20 years as well as the investment practices of virtually all public and private pension funds and endowments.

Read full article [here].
by Rob Feckner, The Contra Costa Times.

Posted: March 4th, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.