PLAN SPONSOR | Q2 12
Strategic research report Changing Gears GM’s Pension Risk Transfer Strategy Gains Traction Grant D. Verhaeghe Director, CAPTRUST Investment Research
General Motors has received significant press coverage since early June about their decision to implement a sizeable pension risk transfer strategy. This event occurred as most defined benefit pension Plan Sponsors were seeking to control cash contribution and financial statement volatility amidst a challenging legislative and accounting change backdrop. Plan Sponsors face three primary obstacles in their quest to control this volatility: (1) low interest rates; (2) volatile capital markets; and (3) demographic uncertainties. The GM decision indicates that some Plan Sponsors are now willing to pay a premium to reduce this uncertainty. In short, they are evaluating strategies to address more than just capital market risk and the asset-liability mismatch. General Motors announced that it planned to reduce its underfunded U.S. salaried pension plan obligation by $26 billion by employing a two-part pension risk transfer strategy. The first component involved offering lump sum payments to one-third of its U.S. retirees. Lump sum windows allow the transfer of assets from the plan to the participant and eliminate mortality risk and premiums associated with annuity purchase. As a result of recent rule changes, a disparity may exist between lump sum rates and current discount rates used to measure pension liabilities. In some cases, this creates an opportunity for Plan Sponsors to pay lump sums out at a lower cost than the current actuarial measure of the liability.
In This Issue Market News
2
Plan Sponsor Highlights
4
Investment Strategy
12
Index Returns
15
Investment Asset Classes
16
CAPTRUST in the News
19
The second component included purchasing a group annuity from Prudential for the remainder of retirees who were not offered or did not elect the lump sum. Buyout strategies—otherwise known as terminal or single-premium group annuities—involve paying an insurance company a premium in order for it to assume the responsibility for paying participants future annuity streams. This strategy eliminates mortality risk but may trigger settlement accounting, and involves paying additional fees to an insurance company beyond the actuarial measure of the liability. This combined pension risk transfer approach will cost GM close to $3 billion in excess of the current liability and will reduce their total estimated U.S. salaried pension plan obligations from ~$134 billion to ~$108 billion. While we were not privy to discussions involving this transaction specifically, it is reasonable to assume that GM was focused on a number of the challenges that face most pension Plan Sponsors today. Following you will find a primer on several of these issues.
continued on page 3