The CalPERS CEO is stepping down according to Bloomberg Television. The Chief Investment Officer resigned yesterday to pursue an independent career in 'green investment.'
Calpers Chief Fred Buenrostro May Leave By Year End, People Say
By Dan Levy
April 25 (Bloomberg) -- California Public Employees' Retirement System Chief Executive Officer Fred Buenrostro is planning to leave by the end of the year, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The board is in discussions with Buenrostro about his departure from the largest U.S. public pension fund, known as Calpers, said the people, who declined to be identified. He has been in the job since 2002 and was on its board of directors for 15 years. Calpers has $244 billion in assets.
The executive would be the third top-ranking officer at Calpers to exit this year. Russell Read, Calpers' chief investment officer, said April 23 that he is resigning on June 30 to begin investing in environmental technologies.
Calpers' spokeswoman Pat Macht didn't immediately return a call for comment.
Buenrostro has a bachelor's degree from Pepperdine University and a law degree from the University of Pacific's McGeorge School of Law.
Read quit after overseeing Calpers investment strategy for two years. Chief Operating Investment Officer Anne Stausboll will replace him until a permanent successor is found.
Calpers last year placed its first direct investments in commodities and in February approved putting as much as 3 percent of its investments in raw materials, seeking to take advantage of soaring worldwide prices. The fund is shifting more of its portfolio from stocks and bonds into private equity, real estate and securities that perform well when inflation accelerates.
Calpers, based in Sacramento, earned a 19.1 percent return for the year ended June 30, 2007, according to its most recent annual report, compared with a gain of 18.4 percent on the Standard & Poor's 500 Index of stocks.
The fund had about 60 percent of its portfolio invested in public equity, about 24 percent in bonds and other fixed income, 8 percent in real estate, 6.7 percent in private equity and 1.4 percent in cash equivalents, the report said.
CalPERS' top investment officer stepping down
After just two years, Russell Read quits the state pension post to pursue green investing.
By Tom Petruno, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 24, 2008
The giant CalPERS pension fund is losing its investment chief to the green movement.
In a surprise, Russell Read -- who has been principal investment officer of the California Public Employees' Retirement System for just two years -- told the pension system's board this week that he's leaving June 30.
Read, 44, said in a letter to the board that he was quitting "to pursue my long-standing interest in environmental and clean-technology investing."
He said by phone from a meeting in New Orleans that his plans weren't fully formed.
He isn't sure if he'll try to manage his own investment fund or build a business in some other way. Whatever the model, he said, he wanted to help bring together what he viewed as now "disconnected efforts" worldwide to develop and implement the best green technologies.
"I might have the ability to play a major role in something that I think is of absolute paramount importance," he said.
Read said he hadn't planned to depart CalPERS this soon, but that events in the mushrooming green-investing industry overtook his own timing. "I didn't anticipate [its] rapid development," he said.
Yet Read, who holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University and earned $958,000 at CalPERS last year, knows plenty about green investing. He has long been a private investor in Maine timberland and is involved in a hardwood reforestation project there.
Read has been pushing the $242-billion CalPERS fund, the nation's largest public pension fund, to shift a chunk of its assets away from stocks and bonds and into commodities, such as oil and timberlands, as well as into public-private partnerships that build infrastructure projects.
One new CalPERS' initiative is a 10-year, $600-million commitment to private-equity funds that are focused on investing in companies developing new energy sources, anti-pollution devices, recycling technologies and other green efforts.
Anne Stausboll, CalPERS' assistant executive officer for investments, will take over as interim investment chief, CalPERS said.
Read came to CalPERS from New York-based Deutsche Asset Management.
CalPERS vows to ease market crisis
by Keren Holland 25 April 2008
The California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) has vowed to ‘aggressively deploy its capacity’ to alleviate current market disruption brought about by the collapse of the auction rate market.
At its recent investment committee, board members were told CalPERS’ Credit Enhancement Program had received an unprecedented number of enquiries to provide liquidity and credit enhancement for conversions into financing structures such as variable rate demand obligations.
The situation is the result of recent difficulties in the auction rate market, where public finance makes up 50% of the $330bn securities issued.
Auctions for these securities began to fail in February when investors declined to bid because of fears monoline insurers, which backed the debt, were no longer creditworthy, and large investment banks declined to act as bidders of last resort, as they had in the past.
This meant issuers were forced to pay a high penalty interest rate, which CalPERS said was putting an onerous burden on municipalities in California and beyond...
About CalPERS
The California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) provides pension fund, healthcare and other retirement services for approximately 1.5 million California public employees.
As of October 2007, it owns $254.8 billion worth of stock, bonds, funds, private equity and real estate. It is the largest pension fund in the United States.
CalPERS provides benefits to all state government employees and, by contract, to local agency and school employees. Many California counties and large cities have their own retirement system.
California teachers are covered under CalSTRS (California State Teacher Retirement System), with funds in excess of $179.6 billion.
