Heather Gillers
speaker
548 appearances
11 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2018
last heard Oct 2021
Heather Gillers’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
WSJ Your Money Briefing · Pensions Got a Market-Rally Boost, But Still Struggle · 5 Aug 2020
podcast
So the Tampa Firefighters and Police Officers Pension Fund, the manager there was able to get some tech stocks like NVIDIA and Amazon and PayPal.
and other kinds of investments that really have done well since, you know, this fund was able to buy them at pretty cheap prices back in March and late February when everyone was kind of freaking out about coronavirus and everything sort of crashed at once.
Well, not a lot, despite having really incredible returns thanks to the stock market.
The issue is that the first quarter was really, really bad.
Both were sort of record-setting in opposite ways.
The way math works, if you lose, in this case it was around 13%, and then the gain was about 11%, but even if it had been equivalent to the loss, you still wouldn't have made up the same amount of ground because...
if you have $100 and you lose 50% of it, and then you gain 50%, you're only back at $75.
No, not at all.
I mean, this is a longstanding problem that comes from years of governments paying less into pension funds than they would have needed to in order to have the money available to pay the benefits that they've promised in the future.
So
Right now, there's close to $9 billion in pension benefits owed by state and local governments, but there's only about $4 billion on hand to cover those promised future benefits.
Now, they're not running out of money right now, but that means that down the road, there are likely going to have to be some difficult choices in terms of
taxpayers paying more or employees paying more into their pensions or, you know, finding some other way to make the math work.
It's generally state and local government workers who still have pensions.
So police, firefighters, teachers, those are probably the main groups, other public employees, the people who work at the DMV and that sort of thing.
Right.
So governments have had their own financial problems, and that is likely to become an issue for pensions down the road because however good a job pension managers do of earning money on their investments, they still need that initial nut.
you know, that initial nest egg to earn money on.
And really, a lot of the financial problems that pensions have go back to governments not putting in enough money in times of budgetary stress.
I think that's something everyone can understand.
Showing 121–140 of 548 · page 7 of 28
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