Fresh from attending the annual convocation of the California State Association of County Retirement Systems, Tom Ford, a 32-year veteran pension fund administrator, concluded in November that consultants were about to discover what he had long suspected: that the subjects of many of the supposedly educational meetings they ran for pension fund administrators were not all that well understood. And if fund officials were just then learning what they should have known much earlier, it probably didn’t speak well of their consultants.
"A lot of trustees in a lot of systems are finding out they don’t have the appetite for the amount of risk their portfolios took on, such as hedge funds," says Ford, the interim retirement administrator of the $1.4 billion Santa Barbara County Employees’ Retirement System. "There’s a good possibility there will be some consultant changes when all this is done."
Pension fund officials...
