WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif. (April 15, 2019) – California State Teachers’ Retirement System announced that trustee Sharon Hendricks was elected to the PRI Association Board. As an independent organization, PRI encourages investors to use responsible investment to enhance returns and better manage risks.
CalSTRS has been the great exception among California public pension systems, different from the others in two important ways. The state helps pay some of its pension costs, and the board lacked the power to set employer rates, needing legislation instead.
Big U.S. pensions are pushing deeper into private equity, seeking exclusive deals alongside buyout firms and at sweeter terms.
Texas and California teachers are ramping up their allocations to co-investments, with more staff and new offices dedicated to buyouts. And Calpers, the largest U.S. pension, discussed this week whether to take a bolder step and do deals on its own.
The upper ranks of hedge funds are almost exclusively white and male. Impactive Capital LP, a new activist fund being launched by two industry veterans, will be one of the exceptions.
Its co-founders and managing partners are Christian Asmar, who is Hispanic, and Lauren Taylor Wolfe. Both spent roughly a decade at activist hedge fund Blue Harbour Group LP before leaving to strike out on their own.
A group of trustees from some of America’s biggest public pension funds are calling on companies to detail costs related to sexual misconduct and any measures they’re taking to address the problem.
The board of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) has approved plans to add a second office tower alongside it 17-story headquarters building in West Sacramento, part of a $300 million campus expansion aimed at attracting new investment staff and other workers.
CalSTRS’ board voted Thursday to oppose a state bill that would require CalSTRS and CalPERS to divest investments in private prison companies by July 1, 2020.
The bill also would bar the $214.9 billion California State Teachers’ Retirement System, West Sacramento, and the $348.7 billion California Public Employees Retirement System, Sacramento, from making additional or new investments or renewing existing investments in a private prison company.
Florida has joined a coalition of major pension funds and investment companies that have adopted a set of principles aimed at encouraging gun manufacturers and retailers to adopt safety and transparency measures.
In signing the Principles for a Responsible Civilian Firearms Industry last month, Florida joined more than a dozen public pension funds and investment companies that have adopted the document. The funds and companies managed nearly $5 trillion in assets as of the fall, according to a mid-November statement from the group.
Soon after news that Volkswagen had cheated on emissions tests became public in September 2015, cutting the German carmaker’s stock almost in half, Brian Bartow, the general counsel for the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, called Irwin Schwartz, a litigation lawyer.
“How badly did we get hurt?” asked Bartow from his Sacramento office.
West Sacramento’s riverfront skyline will get a new addition, with the California State Teachers’ Retirement System’s board committing Thursday to a new building alongside CalSTRS’ current 20-story headquarters.
In a unanimous vote, the board approved plans for a 275,000-square-foot building on what’s now parking for the existing building at 100 Waterfront Place.
GRI is pleased to announce that Ms. Bekeme Masade-Olowola, Mr. Jack Ehnes, and Dr. Jianzhong Lu, will join the GRI Board of Directors for a first 3-year term on 1 January 2019.
The proxy voting system needs to be updated and reformed in order to enhance shareholder confidence and reliability, as well as give equity investors more options in contested ballots, industry stakeholders said. “There’s a consensus by all involved that the proxy voting system has to change,” said David A. Katz, partner at the law firm Wach-tell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York. “It’s antiquated, it’s out of date, it doesn’t help anybody.”
Persuading asset owners to collaborate and work together is challenging, given the inherent competition for investments and returns. Yet a group of Australian investors speaking at the Fiduciary Investors Symposium at Stanford University proved that collaboration can create economies of scale and help reap rewards such as cheaper fees and improved access to opportunities.
Large pension funds are snapping up Wall Street protection against a market crash, but it isn’t clear the products will help limit losses in the current pullback.
Kirsty Jenkinson will be joining the $229.2 billion California State Teachers’ Retirement System as director of corporate governance, replacing Anne Sheehan, who retired in March, system spokesman Michael Sicilia said.
Integrating ESG into investment strategies is easier with active allocations than passive ones. Yet a panel of experts speaking at the PRI in Person conference in San Francisco argued that ESG integration in passive investment is getting easier and is set to grow.
With Tesla closer to transitioning from niche electric-car company to high-volume manufacturer than it’s ever been, discipline and focus have never been needed more. And with its ever-expanding need for funds and with billions of dollars of shareholder equity on the line, you’d think the turmoil sparked by CEO Elon Musk’s erratic public comments would have set off an ear-splitting alarm for its board.
The investment committee of the nation’s second-largest retirement plan, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS), is expected to give approval later this month to a partial restructuring of its approximate $18.5 billion private equity program, the first step in what could be some major changes to the fifth-largest pool of invested private equity capital in the US.
The Council of Institutional Investors is petitioning the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ to limit the listings of companies with dual-class structures, it announced during its Wednesday conference in New York.
