Jan. 10–The Pennsylvania State Employees’ Retirement System said yesterday it earned $5 billion from its investments last year, nearly triple its target.
After paying 91,000 retired state workers and government officials $1.6 billion in pensions, the fund’s assets rose to $24.6 billion from $20.9 billion at the end of 2002, spokesman Sean Sanderson said.
The fund lost money in the previous two years after peaking in 2000 at about $30 billion.
The improvement is good news for Pennsylvania taxpayers. Last spring, SERS said it could need more than $400 million in direct state subsidies in 2004-05 to balance future pension payments with its shrunken investments.
But the fund’s recovery, combined with a new, more forgiving formula for estimating future pensions, held the expected subsidy to about $100 million. (State workers also help fund their pensions from a payroll deduction, usually 6.25 percent.)
SERS was buoyed by last year’s 29 percent rise in the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index. The pension fund invests in U.S. and foreign stocks, bonds, private equity and real estate. SERS is also one of the nation’s biggest investors in unregulated hedge funds, which try to deliver an “absolute return” even in bad market years.
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