December 2019

Canadian Pensions Acquire Stake in Mexican Construction Firm

The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan have agreed to acquire stakes in Mexican construction engineering company Impulsora del Desarrollo y el Empleo en América Latina (IDEAL). Under the terms of the deal, CPPIB and Ontario Teachers’ will launch a tender offer on the Mexican stock exchange for shares in IDEAL at 43.96 pesos ($2.25) per share. CPPIB will come away with a 23.7% stake in IDEAL, while Ontario Teachers will own 16.3% of...

Major pension plans join investor group pumping $229M into fintech fund

The Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec and the Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP) are among a group of at least 14 investors pumping $229 million into an international fintech fund run by Portag3 Ventures, an early-stage investor established by companies under the umbrella of the Desmarais family’s Power Corp. The disclosed institutional and strategic investors committing the new funds also include insurance companies and financial institutions from Canada, France, Israel and the United States. Among them...

November 2019

Will Negative Rates Finally Kill Pensions?

Economists once thought that negative interest rates were impossible. Not only are they possible, but they may hasten the end of a dying business practice. Read also Negative Rates Can Do a Lot More Damage Yet: Nordic Warning I have written in this space before about the repercussions of other countries issuing bonds with negative yields. The past decade has conclusively proved that negative interest rates are not only possible but likely to remain part of the international...

February 2017

Longevity Risk and Private Pensions

By Pablo Antolin This paper examines how uncertainty regarding future mortality and life expectancy outcomes, i.e. longevity risk, affects employer-provided defined benefit (DB) private pension plans liabilities. The paper argues that to assess uncertainty and associated risks adequately, a stochastic approach to model mortality and life expectancy is preferable because it permits to attach probabilities to different forecasts. In this regard, the paper provides the results of estimating the Lee-Carter model for several OECD countries. Furthermore, it conveys the uncertainty...

Risky Choices: Simulating Public Pension Funding Stress with Realistic Shocks

By James Farrell, Daniel Shoag State and local government pension funds in the United States collectively manage a very large and diverse pool of assets to meet the even large sum of accrued liabilities. Recent research has emphasized that widely-used accounting practices, like matching discount rates to expected asset returns, understate the market value of these liabilities. Less work has explored the risks inherent in existing diverse set asset allocations, and the accounting practices used by most state and local...