Editorials

Pension fund executives were among leaders in the effort to reform the financial system and end the doctrine of too big to fail. Yet, some pension funds themselves have come to be seen by some as too big to fail, and have become the subjects of potential bailouts.

When talent and management come into conflict at a money management firm, they can create a toxic environment that threatens the firm's stability, investment performance and growth.

Today marks the first anniversary of the emergence of the rabble-rousing and passionate Occupy Wall Street movement, an appropriate time to reflect on the meaning for institutional investors of its foundational issues of corporate greed and corruption.

The multiemployer model is dead. Long live the multiemployer model. That message is the essence of a new agreement between United Parcel Service Inc. and the $2.6 billion New England Teamsters & Trucking Industry Pension Fund. The agreement should serve as a model for troubled multiemployer plans

General Motors Co.'s annuitization of $26 billion in pension obligations should be a game-changer for corporations in the way they finance and manage defined benefit plan risk.

Institutional investors, every day entering new territory in the financial markets, add to their risk by neglecting to develop a coherent set of beliefs about the capital markets and the economy to frame their investment process and guide its implementation.

The answer to the problems with LIBOR — the London interbank offered rate — is to use a market rate not subject to manipulations by a few institutions.

Strange as it may seem, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 could eventually affect private and public pension plans.

To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a bureaucrat, everything looks like a problem that needs to be solved by a new regulation, or new clarification (read “expansion”) of an existing reg.

The decline in tax-exempt assets managed by the 500 largest U.S. managers of such assets, reported in the May 28 issue of Pensions & Investments, could be a forewarning of key issues money managers and pension executives soon will have to face.

The J.P. Morgan Chase derivatives fiasco, which reportedly has cost the bank in excess of $2 billion, is confirmation once again of the truth of Warren Buffett's observation, “Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction.”

Investors had pulled more than $9.1 billion out of equity mutual funds in May even before the Facebook IPO face-plant, and that financial train wreck will certainly not help restore individual investor confidence in the equity markets.