Month: February 2022

Who Cares About Life Expectancy?

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://contingencies.org/who-cares-about-life-expectancy/

Excerpt:

Life expectancy at birth (LEB) in the U.S. has grown about 50% since 1900, with most of the increase going to upper income groups. (See “Differences in Life Expectancy by Income Level”; Contingencies;July/August 2016.)Depending on the data source and the methodology used to determine it, LEB in the U.S. is about 77 and 82 for males and females, respectively.

I’m a retiree, so I’m more interested in life expectancy at age 65 (LE65). (OK, fine, life expectancy at a somewhat higher age is more pertinent for me, but LE65 is the more common measurement.) LE65 in America is about 18.2 and 20.8 for males and females, again depending on the dataset and methodology.

LEB and LE65 in America are calculated from a dataset of 330 million lives. Another dataset of 7.5 billion lives provides a LEB of 68 and 72 for males and females, a significant difference from the LEB mentioned earlier. The 7.5-billion-life dataset was the world population rather than the U.S. population subset. A meaningful LEB requires homogeneity of the underlying dataset.

Author(s): Bob Rietz

Publication Date: Jan/Feb 2022

Publication Site: Contingencies

Book Review: Lifespan

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-lifespan

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Excerpt:

David Sinclair – Harvard professor, celebrity biologist, and author of Lifespan – thinks solving aging will be easy. “Aging is going to be remarkably easy to tackle. Easier than cancer” are his exact words, which is maybe less encouraging than he thinks.

There are lots of ways that solving aging could be hard. What if humans worked like cars? To restore an old car, you need to fiddle with hundreds of little parts, individually fixing everything from engine parts to chipping paint. Fixing humans to such a standard would be way beyond current technology.

Or what if the DNA damage theory of aging was true? This says that as cells divide (or experience normal wear and tear) they don’t copy their DNA exactly correctly. As you grow older, more and more errors creep in, and your cells become worse and worse at their jobs. If this were true, there’s not much to do either: you’d have to correct the DNA in every cell in the body (using what template? even if you’d saved a copy of your DNA from childhood, how do you get it into all 30 trillion cells?) This is another nonstarter.

Sinclair’s own theory offers a simpler option. He starts with a puzzling observation: babies are very young [citation needed]. If a 70 year old man marries a 40 year old woman and has a baby, that baby will start off at zero years old, just like everyone else. Even more interesting, if you clone a 70 year old man, the clone start at zero years old.

….

So Sinclair thinks aging is epigenetic damage. As time goes on, cells lose or garble the epigenetic markers telling them what cells to be. Kidney cells go from definitely-kidney-cells to mostly kidney cells but also a little lung cell and maybe some heart cell in there too. It’s hard to run a kidney off of cells that aren’t entirely sure whether they’re supposed to be kidney cells or something else, and so your kidneys (and all your other organs) break down as you age. He doesn’t come out and say this is literally 100% of aging. But everyone else thinks aging is probably a combination of many complicated processes, and I think Sinclair thinks it’s mostly epigenetic damage and then a few other odds and ends that matter much less.

Author(s): Scott Alexander

Publication Date: 1 Dec 2021

Publication Site: Astral Codex Ten

Boomers Who Left Jobs During Pandemic Aren’t Claiming Social Security: Study

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2021/12/30/boomers-who-left-jobs-during-pandemic-arent-claiming-social-security-study/

Excerpt:

The research showed that the rate at which older workers left employment increased dramatically during the pandemic. 

This was especially the case with women — an 8-percentage-point increase vs. 7 points for men; Asian Americans — a 13-point increase; those with less than a college degree — a 10-point increase; and workers with occupations that did not lend themselves to remote work.

….

There was one exception: Workers 70 and older were 5.9 percentage points more likely to leave the workforce and retire. The study noted that these workers were likely already receiving Social Security benefits, so claiming did not markedly increase.

Among all workers 55 and older, the monthly claiming rate for Social Security benefits remained constant between April 2019 and June 2021, the researchers found.

Author(s): Michael S. Fischer

Publication Date: 30 Dec 2021

Publication Site: Think Advisor

Has COVID Affected Pensions for Workers without Social Security?

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://crr.bc.edu/briefs/has-covid-affected-pensions-for-workers-without-social-security/

PDF: https://crr.bc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/SLP81.pdf

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Excerpt:

At the outset of the pandemic recession, many feared it would undermine workers’ employer-sponsored retirement plans.

State and local employees who are not covered by Social Security would have been particularly vulnerable, as they lack the buffer this program offers.

Their employer defined benefit plans would have been hurt by a long recession with poor investment returns and reduced contributions due to tax shortfalls.

Instead, these plans exceeded their return targets; tax revenues held up; and government sponsors got stimulus aid, so plan funded ratios actually improved.

And long-term structural headwinds such as negative cash flows and aggressive return targets still pose little risk to their ability to pay future benefits.

Author(s):Jean-Pierre Aubry and Kevin Wandrei

Publication Date: January 2022

Publication Site: Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, Working Paper

SEC Set to Lower Massive Boom on Private Equity Industry

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/02/sec-set-to-lower-massive-boom-on-private-equity-industry.html

Excerpt:

In a matter of fact, understated manner, the SEC document makes clear that its enforcement regime has not succeeded in getting private equity fund managers to stop or at least considerably reduce their abuses. Recall that in 2014, then enforcement chief Andrew Bowden gave a peculiarly titled speech, Spreading Sunshine in Private Equity. The SEC has just started its initial examinations of private equity firms. Bowden said that the SEC had found serious abuses in more than half of the firms examines, including what in other circles would be called embezzlement. Bowden also said if anything the misconduct was more prevalent at the biggest firms, which was the reverse of what it found in other areas it regulated, where the crooked operators were normally boiler-room level.

This promising start quickly fizzled out. Yes, the SEC did engage in a series of enforcements actions, targeting common abuses like charging “termination of monitoring fees” which had never been contemplated in the fund agreements, and hauling up big name firms like Apollo, KKR, and Blackstone. However, this amounted to enforcement theater. The SEC acted as if “one and done,” citing particular firms for an isolated abuse, when all the big players were certain to have engaged in many others, and then acting as if everyone would shape up, was either craven or willfully blind. Bowden immediately turned to giving speeches on how private equity firms were obviously upstanding and wanted to do right. He then gave a speech at Stanford at a private equity conference where went on far too long about how he wanted his son to work in private equity and an audience member immediately said he wanted to hire him. Bowden left the agency in three weeks.

This SEC letter, by contrast, makes clear that the agency has ample evidence in its files of continued abuses by private equity fund managers. It does not mention a particularly egregious general strategy: of admitting in the annual disclosure documents, the Form ADV, that the private equity fund managers are violating their contracts with investors. Admitting a contractual violation does not cure it, but the private equity barons appear to believe they can create their own alternative reality. And until Gensler showed up, that belief looked to be correct.

Author(s): Yves Smith

Publication Date: 10 Feb 2022

Publication Site: naked capitalism

If you’re vaxxed, you’re more likely to be killed by lightning than die of COVID: study

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://nypost.com/2022/02/08/lightnings-more-likely-good-odds-for-vaxxed/

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Excerpt:

Those odds can be gauged from a study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They tracked more than 1 million vaccinated adults in America over most of last year, including the period when the Delta variant was surging, and classified victims of COVID according to risk factors such as being over 65, being immunosuppressed or suffering from diabetes or chronic diseases of the heart, kidney, lungs, liver or brain.

The researchers report that none of the healthy people under 65 had a severe case of COVID that required treatment in an intensive-care unit.

 Not a single one of these nearly 700,000 people died, and the risk was minuscule for most older people, too. Among vaccinated people over 65 without an underlying medical condition, only one person died.

In all, there were 36 deaths, mostly among a small minority of older people with a multitude of comorbidities: the 3% of the sample that had at least four risk factors.

Author(s): John Tierney

Publication Date: 8 Feb 2022

Publication Site: NY Post

Opinion: A Slow But Accelerating Crisis—Preserving Affordable Housing for Up to 1.4 Million NYers

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://citylimits.org/2022/02/08/opinion-a-slow-but-accelerating-crisis-preserving-affordable-housing-for-up-to-1-4-million-nyers/

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Excerpt:

The recent op-ed in Crain’s New York Business by former City Comptrollers Jay Goldin and Elizabeth Holtzman (“Affordable housing initiative worked in the past and can work again today”) recalled a city pension fund program, initiated in 1983, that was specifically designed to finance the renovation of deteriorated rental apartment buildings in lower income neighborhoods. Supported by New York State mortgage insurance, the pension investments financed the restoration of a wide range of apartment buildings and worked uniquely well for small buildings with owners of limited resources. Two percent of the pension funds’ assets were committed for long-term, fixed-rate mortgages, with an interest rate priced at the market, with a two-year rate lock while the capital improvements were made.

Recognizing that these buildings would need some public subsidy—and that many owners lacked the experience to deal with complex government processing—a system evolved whereby these investments were coupled with streamlined city subsidy programs. The program’s goal: to restore a building’s physical and economic health while keeping its apartments affordable. 

The pension funds filled a critical gap as most conventional long-term lenders viewed this market as too complicated and too unprofitable. For many years after its inception, the Community Preservation Corporation was the primary user of the program, using its “one-stop-shop” to originate construction loans for predominantly small properties. Upon construction completion, the long-term mortgage was provided by the pension funds. Over time, other banks were approved to originate loans for the funds, with their focus mainly on financing the renovation of larger buildings. 

….

Fourth, the pension funds should recommit to investing up to 2 percent of their assets (now $5 billion) for long-term financing at a market rate, insured by the State Mortgage Insurance Fund. In the long history of the program, the funds have experienced no losses, the state insurance fund covering the few losses that had occurred. 

Efficient implementation can minimize the use of public funds and provide a large pool of fixed-rate, long-term financing for these properties. Doing so is within the purview of the city’s comptroller and the pension fund trustees.

Author(s):Michael D. Lappin

Publication Date: 8 Feb 2022

Publication Site: City Limits

USVI to refinance bonds to save public pension system

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/usvi-refinance-bonds-save-public-pension-system-82753296

Excerpt:

The governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands signed a bill Wednesday to refinance more than $800 million worth of bonds following numerous attempts to save a public pension system that officials say faces collapse.

Gov. Albert Bryan Jr. said the savings from improved interest rates would help stabilize the pension system for at least 30 years. Nearly 9,000 government retirees and 8,000 active workers rely on the public pension system, which officials warned could run out of funds by 2024 or sooner without a fix.

Author(s): Associated Press

Publication Date: 8 Feb 2022

Publication Site: ABC News

DC Plans Use Pension Features to Improve Retirement Outcomes

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://www.plansponsor.com/in-depth/dc-plans-use-pension-features-improve-retirement-outcomes/

Excerpt:

To help participants grow their balances, employer-sponsored DC plans are also incorporating behavioral finance concepts into plan design and architecture by automating systems.

“Now we see automatic enrollment, we see target dates, we see managed accounts that are becoming more complex and having more options as baked into defined contribution plans,” says Deb Dupont, assistant vice president for retirement plans research at the LIMRA Secure Retirement Institute. “All of these things make it much easier and in fact [a] more passive decision on the part of the participant.”

Legislation, including 2019’s Setting Up Every Community for Retirement Act, has also eased plan sponsors’ responsibilities when selecting an insurer to offer annuitization options for participants’ decumulation stage. The safe harbor has prompted sponsors to increasingly build lifetime income options into their plans to provide retirement income certainty. And prior to the SECURE Act, the Pension Protection Act of 2006 led to widespread adoption of qualified default investment alternatives, including target-date funds, which helped DC plans incorporate ideas from DB plans, Dupont adds.   

Author(s): Noah Zuss

Publication Date: 9 Feb 2022

Publication Site: Plansponsor

CHICAGO’S $43,100 DEBT PER TAXPAYER DRIVEN BY PENSION DEBT

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://www.illinoispolicy.org/chicagos-43100-debt-per-taxpayer-driven-by-pension-debt/

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Excerpt:

Chicago once again earned a failing grade from Truth in Accounting in their latest Financial State of the Citiesreport thanks to over $38 billion in debt – $43,100 for each taxpayer.

Every Chicagoan would have to send the city that amount just for Chicago to pay the bills it owes. Chicago has just $9.9 billion available to pay $48.6 billion in bills. The Windy City came in 74th out of 75 cities studied in the report, only besting New York City’s massive $204 billion debt with a per-taxpayer burden of $71,400.

The city’s financial failings stem from pension promises the city cannot afford to keep. “Chicago’s financial problems stem mostly from unfunded retirement obligations that have accumulated over the years. The city had set aside only 23 cents for every dollar of promised pension benefits and no money for promised retiree health care benefits,” the report notes.

Author(s):Justin Carlson

Publication Date: 8 Feb 2022

Publication Site: Illinois Policy Institute

Public Pension Systems Pared Costs and Assumptions in 2021, NCPERS Study Finds

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220202005695/en/Public-Pension-Systems-Pared-Costs-and-Assumptions-in-2021-NCPERS-Study-Finds

Excerpt:

Pension systems said earnings on investments accounted for 68% of overall pension revenues in their most recent fiscal year. Employer contributions made up 23% of revenues, and employee contributions totaled 8%.

The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated efforts by public pension systems to expand their communications capabilities. In all, 78% offered live web conferences to members during 2021, up from 54% a year earlier.

Pension funds that participated in the survey in 2020 and 2021 reported that their funded levels rose to 72.3%, from 71.7%. Overall, pension funds reported a funded level of 74.7% for 2021. While funded levels are not as important to pensions’ sustainability as steady contributions are, the trend is positive.

The inflation assumption for the funds’ most recent fiscal year remained steady at 2.7%. These assumptions were in place in the midst of an acceleration in the rate of inflation, which reached 7% at the end of 2021, from 1.4% a year earlier, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Author(s): NCPERS

Publication Date: 2 Feb 2022

Publication Site: Businesswire

Massachusetts Should Reject Gross Receipts Taxes

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://taxfoundation.org/massachusetts-gross-receipts-tax/

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Excerpt:

The economic harms of the gross receipts tax (GRT) were well understood by the early 20th century. Not only is the tax inequitable, but it is also inefficient and distortionary. That is why most states abandoned GRTs in the early 1900s, as states developed the capacity to administer less harmful taxes. Unfortunately, some policymakers in Massachusetts want to turn back the clock.

Today, only a handful of states levy any variation of the GRT. Those that still rely on them as a significant source of revenue (like Texas, Nevada, Ohio, and Washington) typically do so in lieu of one or more alternative taxes. None of these states imposes a corporate income tax, and Ohio repealed several other business taxes as well when it adopted its GRT.

Some Massachusetts policymakers, however, want to layer a GRT atop the state’s existing corporate income tax. If H.2855 becomes law, it would reduce the competitiveness of the Bay State and increase prices for consumers on already expensive goods and services. To make matters worse, Bay Staters would be asked to shoulder the added tax burden at a time when inflation is already eroding purchasing power at a rate not seen 1982.

Author(s): Timothy Vermeer

Publication Date: 9 Feb 2022

Publication Site: Tax Foundation