The House of Representatives passed the SECURE Act (Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement) earlier this year with near-unanimous support from the members (417-3). Although we are pleased to see the bi-partisan effort, is this where their energy should...

Failure to pass important legislation to protect and preserve critical and declining multiemployer plans will lead to a national crisis that will not only impact the nearly 1.4 million Americans who were promised a pension, but the economic fall-out will...

The PBGC has issued new guarantee limits for single-employer plans that fail in 2020 which will increase by 3.65% over 2019 limits, due to ERISA indexing requirements. Regrettably, the guarantee limits for multiemployer plans are not indexed and therefore have...

Milliman is reporting that the aggregate funded ratio for the U.S. Multiemployer pension system improved to 82% from 74% during the first six months, as they estimated that the average plan's investment gain was 13.4%. It has been a great...

As regular readers of our blog know, we spend most of our effort focusing on pension-related issues generally and the importance of knowing one's liabilities more specifically. However, we do depart from our mission periodically to bring to our readers...

There is a day designated for almost everything that we can imagine, so I shouldn't have been surprised to read that today is World Math Day. Let's celebrate! Another fact that I didn't know is that those living in NJ...

I stumbled on an article in The Orange County (CA) Register, titled "Pension Obligation Bonds Are A Poor Fix For Pension Debts". The gist of the argument is that by engaging in the use of a POB, one is simply...

I am looking forward to speaking at the upcoming IFEBP in San Diego. I've been asked to speak about "Modern Asset Allocation", which is a great topic. One of the key points that I will make is that plan sponsors...

We are pleased to share with you the latest Ryan ALM quarterly newsletter (9/30/19). As you will see, despite strong market returns achieved so far in 2019, DB pension liabilities have witnessed rapid growth as U.S. interest rates continue to...

How have defined benefit plans faired in 2019? That depends very much on how you measure pension liabilities. If you believe that liabilities and assets grow at the same rate (the ROA under GASB), then 2019 is a very strong...