The most significant cause of the current pension crisis is the failure to contribute enough to these plans! As a result, too much emphasis has been placed on generating out-sized returns, which have failed to materialize. Oh, we've had brief...

Anyone who knows Ryan ALM and who has followed our blog posts for years knows that we are big supporters of DB plans as the primary retirement vehicle for the masses. We've discussed our rationale for this stance numerous times....

Representatives from the Federal Reserve Bank in St. Louis recently discussed on a defined contribution webinar the implications for the retirement industry as a result of the Covid-19 crisis. The key action items discussed were all significant issues prior to...

We, at Ryan ALM, are proud to share with you Ron Ryan's chapter on Cash Flow Matching, also known as cash flow driven investing (CDI), that will appear in Dr. Frank Fabozzi's latest edition of the "Handbook of Fixed Income...

I read with both interest and fascination an article in the WSJ today that mentioned that the last surviving Civil War pension recipient had just passed away. Irene Triplett was born in 1930. Her dad, Mose Triplett, was 83 when...

Yesterday's blog post highlighted once again why asking untrained individuals to fund, manage, and disburse a retirement benefit (DC offering) is incredibly challenging. We highlighted the fact that fund flows for the month of April showed a significant bias toward...

The equity market reaction to the Covid-19 lock-down was destabilizing! Many professionals were torn on what to do in the face of this unprecedented event. Why would we believe that less-trained 401(k) "investors" would behave in a manner different than...

Most of us have read numerous articles discussing the "excessive" cost of maintaining a state or municipal pension system, and there are certainly examples of states that are seeing a fairly significant percentage of their annual budgets going to support...

It should come as no surprise that Americans who have recently lost jobs, and there are roughly 40 million of those, are now tapping into whatever retirement account that they have to help bridge the loss of their paycheck. According...

A terrific article appears In the May 18th issue of P&I, titled, "After extinguishing fires, asset owners turning to liquidity". The article cites examples from many large overseas plans on how they are handling or preparing for greater cash needs...