Pension Actuaries: The Joke Is On Us

…An Actuary is someone who wanted to be an accountant but didn’t have the personality for it….An introverted actuary stares at his own feet, and extroverted one stares at the other person’s feet….What is the difference between God and an actuary?  God doesn’t think he is an actuary….”Look at the white horses over there.” Actuary: “They’re white on this side, anyway.”

Unfortunately, when it comes to the mess our pensions are in, actuaries are no joke. Pension funds labor under actuarial assumption for expected returns that are mainly pulled out of thin air without any regard for financial economics. Does anyone really think pensions will be able to grow at seven percent or more per annum? When they are constrained by their various constituents to hold 50% to 60% in bonds and cash? (See Figure 3 of this OECD publication.)

Those unrealistic assumptions lead to unsupportable levels of contributions, and thus pensions are underfunded as a matter of course. You know the assumption are wrong when virtually every pension is on the negative side of the ledger. But the actuaries do not seem to have been trained in the concept of making course corrections. Nor do they educate themselves in financial economics to better evaluate the mess they are creating.

Why am I going into this? Over the weekend I attended an event honoring a former colleague of mine from my days at Morgan Stanley, Jeremy Gold. He is an actuary who has spent his career trying to move the pension actuaries toward a firmer foundation in financial economics — to have them at least avail themselves of what financial economists can provide. In the mid-1980’s, Jeremy and I worked together in the Fixed Income Research Group at Morgan Stanley. He and I went of various trips to push fixed income products, and to market the fledging new strategy of portfolio insurance (flying out once to have dinner with the head of the Port Authority of Los Angeles, who we discovered, part way through the first course, had — surprise — thought we were selling port insurance). We co-authored a paper in 1988, In Search of the Liability Asset, that is still on various reading lists, maybe not for actuaries, but at least for those in finance.

Jeremy left Morgan Stanley in the late 1980’s to get a Ph.D. from Wharton, and spent the next twenty years as a thorn in the side of the actuarial profession, pushing them to add financial and economic structure to their methods. One of the best and most widely read of his works for this is the paper Reinventing Pension Actuarial Science.

At the base of it, finance is not actuarial science. It is not predicated on repeatable, or even known, probabilities. There is no appeal to the law of large numbers for the systematic risks of the financial system. The future does not look like the past. There are no mortality tables for asset returns.

…What do actuaries and Packer fans have in common? They both think that history will repeat itself…

So if you want to be the arbiter for over 20 trillion of U.S. pension assets, a good start is to do it based upon a foundation in finance.