PERS

Playing with the PERS

Geoffrey Lawrence

Constitutional provisions prohibit the Nevada Legislature from dictating how money in the Public Employees' Retirement System is invested. However, in the final days of the recent legislative session, state lawmakers passed a law attempting to do exactly that.

Assembly Bill 493 would require NV PERS to delineate the portion of its investments maintained in companies that do business in Iran. While this requirement does not allow legislators to direct precisely how PERS assets are invested, the intent is clear. As Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford said, "transparency changes behavior."

The Nevada Policy Research Institute has long advocated greater transparency in government and in no way opposes sunlight on the investment decisions of NV PERS. However, legislative leaders have indicated an intention behind Assembly Bill 493 that goes beyond simple transparency. Clearly the intent is to isolate for inspection only some particular investments — those that individual lawmakers either view with personal disdain or see laden with opportunities for political grandstanding.

Are lawmakers angling for a popular mandate that would eventually allow them to manipulate NV PERS investment decisions based on their own subjective value judgments, rather than the possible return on those investments?

Down that road could be a catastrophic burden for state taxpayers. As NV PERS is currently structured, Nevada taxpayers are obligated to pay defined monthly benefits to retired state and local government workers. Ideally, those benefits are paid using the return on NV PERS' portfolio of investments. However, if the return on those investments were to become insufficient to pay retirement benefits — the cost for which is now more than $1 billion annually and is growing at an annual rate of 10.9 percent — state taxpayers would still be contractually obligated to make the payments. This would inevitably occur through higher tax rates.

In neighboring California, policymakers regularly manipulate investment decisions of the CalPERS system in attempts to achieve political goals. CalPERS funds are channeled toward investments in firms that provide products or services the politicians anoint as "socially desirable," regardless of the firms' profitability. Firms that have been preferred targets of this investment approach, known as "socially responsible investment (SRI)," have principally included renewable-energy manufacturers and financial institutions — particularly those that offered large volumes of subprime mortgages as a form of "community reinvestment."

As a result of these investment practices, the value of CalPERS' assets has consistently failed to grow at the same pace of pension funds that have emphasized the rate of return. In FY 2008, for example, while the position of pension funds around the country deteriorated due to economic recession, the position of CalPERS deteriorated at a pace far more dramatic. While NV PERS was investing on the basis of market fundamentals and lost only 2.2 percent in valuation of its net assets, or $503 million, CalPERS' emphasis on SRI saw the valuation of its net assets fall by 4.9 percent, or $12.5 billion.

On a macroeconomic scale, it is significant that many of CalPERS' largest holdings were in the very industries that have since been recognized as the "bubble markets," whose bursting triggered the current recession. In fact, the SRI approach used by CalPERS and similar pension funds appears to have contributed to the creation of those bubbles by channeling capital toward industries that did not merit such investments based on market fundamentals. This overinvestment in undeserving industries by large pension funds such as CalPERS contributed to a classic instance of malinvestment, in which productive resources became misallocated across the economy. As Austrian Business Cycle theory states, such bubble-breeding government investment led inevitably to economic bust and recession. Hence, the end result of the SRI approach is to contribute directly to economic carnage. How "socially responsible" is that?

As a result of the losses endured by CalPERS due to California's political thumb-on-the-scale investment approach, Golden State taxpayers now face a real threat of yet higher, even more extortionary tax rates. This kind of possibility is a key reason why Nevada lawmakers are constitutionally prohibited from toying with the investment decisions of NV PERS.

Right now, state lawmakers consciously walk a fine line with regard to governance of NV PERS.

They need to remember that attempts to step across that fine line and undermine Nevada's constitutional prohibition will brand them indelibly as enemies both of constitutional government and of the public they claim to represent.

Geoffrey Lawrence is a fiscal policy analyst at the Nevada Policy Research Institute. This article originally appeared in the July 2009 edition of the Nevada Business Journal.

Geoffrey Lawrence

Geoffrey Lawrence

Director of Research

Geoffrey Lawrence is director of research at Nevada Policy.

Lawrence has broad experience as a financial executive in the public and private sectors and as a think tank analyst. Lawrence has been Chief Financial Officer of several growth-stage and publicly traded manufacturing companies and managed all financial reporting, internal control, and external compliance efforts with regulatory agencies including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.  Lawrence has also served as the senior appointee to the Nevada State Controller’s Office, where he oversaw the state’s external financial reporting, covering nearly $10 billion in annual transactions. During each year of Lawrence’s tenure, the state received the Certificate of Achievement for Excellence in Financial Reporting Award from the Government Finance Officers’ Association.

From 2008 to 2014, Lawrence was director of research and legislative affairs at Nevada Policy and helped the institute develop its platform of ideas to advance and defend a free society.  Lawrence has also written for the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, with particular expertise in state budgets and labor economics.  He was delighted at the opportunity to return to Nevada Policy in 2022 while concurrently serving as research director at the Reason Foundation.

Lawrence holds an M.A. in international economics from American University in Washington, D.C., an M.S. and a B.S. in accounting from Western Governors University, and a B.A. in international relations from the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.  He lives in Las Vegas with his beautiful wife, Jenna, and their two kids, Carson Hayek and Sage Aynne.