Wednesday, July 22, 2009

100 Billion Dollars in Pension Funds-GONE

Marc Lifsher Reporting From Sacramento -- With a state budget agreement at hand, look for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to tackle the state's troubled retirement system.

On Tuesday, the country's two biggest public pension funds reported losing almost $100 billion in the fiscal year that ended June 30. And the governor is expected to highlight the new numbers as he renews a campaign to trim the cost of providing lifetime, fixed benefits to hundreds of thousands of government retirees.
No long-term fix is more important to our state's solvency," Schwarzenegger wrote in an opinion column in The Times this month. The governor plans to ask the Legislature to approve changes in the system.

The state, he said, would save money by giving smaller pensions to new state workers through changing "our unsustainable retiree pension formulas."

The governor's push for a pension overhaul took on a new urgency when the California Public Employees' Retirement System and a sister agency, the California State Teachers' Retirement System, separately announced that they'd lost about a quarter of the value of their investment portfolios. CalPERS' preliminary losses were $56.2 billion, while the teachers' retirement system lost $43.4 billion.
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