China looking like a bad investment for US pension funds

 American Action News:

U.S. public pensions have invested more than $68 billion in China and Hong Kong over the past three years despite the country’s struggling economy and allegations of human rights abuses, according to the bipartisan advocacy group Future Union.

In total, 42 states have at least one public pension that has invested in Chinese or Hong Kong assets in the last three years, and a total of 29 out of 74 pensions have made new investments in the past year, according to a report from Future Union. From the start of 2023 through October, institutional investors have pulled out over $31 billion in stocks and bonds from the Chinese financial system, culminating in the worst outflow since 2001 as stockholders grow increasingly pessimistic about their investments amid the country’s economic uncertainty.

California pensions have the most allocated to adversarial assets, with the California Public Employees Retirement System having invested more than $4.8 billion in the last three years, while the state’s teachers’ retirement pension has invested $5.6 billion, according to the report. Each investment into China or Hong Kong has an investment period of 10 years, and 56 of the 74 public pension funds have made follow-up investments in the past 36 months on their foreign assets.

China’s economy has failed to resume the growth rates that it saw before the COVID-19 pandemic and continued to show slow and under-expectation growth in areas like consumption and manufacturing. In data released in December, retail sales grew only 10.1% for the year compared to expectations of 12.9% growth, while fixed-asset investment from January to November only grew 2.9%.
...

China's response to COVID-19 probably led to a decrease in productivity.  They took a totalitarian approach to the pandemic like some of the more liberal states within the US and the result was economic regression.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more