The Myth That A Healthy Pension Plan Is 80% Funded: Reality is 125% Funding is Needed To Survive Downturns

Flashback to 2012 for this classic from Governing reports:

Half-truth #4: "Experts consider 80 percent to be a healthy funding level for a public pension fund."

This urban legend has now invaded the popular press, so it's about time somebody set the record straight. No panel of experts ever made such a pronouncement. No reputable and objective expert that I can find has ever been quoted as saying this. What we have here is a classic myth. People refer to one report or another to substantiate their claim that some presumed experts actually made this assertion (including a GAO report and a Pew Center report that both cite unidentified experts), but nobody actually names these alleged "sources." Like UFOs, these "experts" are always unidentified. That's because they don't actually exist. They can't exist, because the pension math and 80 years of data from capital markets history just don't support these unsubstantiated claims.

With only one rare and fleeting exception (which occurs at the very bottom of a business cycle, similar to the green flash in a tropical sunset), 80 percent funding is not a sufficient, sound or healthy funding level for a pension fund. The only authoritative references to 80 percent funding ratios are the federal ERISA and pension protection act provisions which require private-sector pension plans below 80 percent funding to take immediate remedial action! (Remember that public plans are not even governed by these laws.) These statutes do not make funding ratios at 80 percent "healthy" or "good" or "sound" or "well-funded." Pensions funded at 80 percent are no different than a $400,000 house in a distressed neighborhood with a $500,000 mortgage — you can keep living there if you keep making the payments, but it's underwater and your balance sheet is now upside down no matter how much you try to double-talk it. The only difference is that state and local governments can't mail in the keys to the bank.

Until the last recession, respectable and world-wise actuaries would tell you privately that when a pension system gets its funding ratio above 100 percent, there is a political problem. Employees, unions and politicians suddenly become grave-robbers who invariably break into the tomb to steal enhanced benefits and pension contribution holidays. So these savvy advisors historically have tolerated modest underfunding, based on their recurring past experience with the forces of evil in this business. They figured the ideal public plan would drift between 80 to 100 percent funding over a market cycle, and nobody would be hurt if the plans were a "little bit underfunded" in normal times. Obviously that didn't work out so well in the Great Recession, which has forced us all to take a harder look at the math and this conventional wisdom.

As I have explained in one of my very first Governing columns in late 2007 (when the last business cycle was peaking), a fully funded pension plan must today have market-value assets of 125 percent of current accrued actuarial liabilities near the peak of an average business cycle — in order to offset the near-certain loss of stock market values in the following recession. Historically, that is because the 14 recessions since 1926 (including the most recent) have shrunk equity values by 30 percent on average, and equity investments represent about two-thirds of the average public pension funds' portfolio. Real-time pension funding ratios will therefore likely decline by about 20 percent in the average recession, depending on how much the bond portfolio offsets the stock losses and mounting liabilities. So there is not a major public pension plan in the United States today that can be described as "overfunded."

A pension plan that is 100 percent funded at the end of a business expansion will likely lose 20 percent of its value in an average recession, so 80 percent is the bare-minimum "healthy" funding level at the bottom of a recession — and only then. Once the economy begins to recover, it is mathematically necessary for a reasonable funding ratio to be higher than 80 percent and rising on a clear path to full funding. Otherwise, the plan is doomed to be chronically underfunded with current taxpayers supporting retirees who didn't ever work for them. A plan funded at 80 percent going into a recession will likely find itself funded at 65 percent at the cyclical trough — and that's a toxic recipe calling for huge increases in employer contributions to thereafter pay off the unfunded liabilities. That's why today's 70 percent funding ratios are a legitimate concern and a financial burden on younger generations who will inherit this problem that their elders keep sidestepping.

Get educated and read this article.