Wyoming made $770 million from investments of its $14.4 billion in trust funds during the 2010-11 fiscal year and finished repaying losses from the 2008 economic bust.
“We’ve had two really good years,” State Treasurer Joe Meyer told the Select Committee on Capital Financing and Investments, which met in Casper earlier this month. “So we live happily ever after until the next crisis comes.”
Meyer presented his investment report to the legislators to bring them up to speed on the state’s major permanent trust funds before the budget session begins.
“For the fiscal year ending June 30 … we made $770 million on this $14 billion portfolio, and we distributed out $622 million [to various state agencies],” said Chief Investment Officer Michael Walden-Newman, from the treasurer’s office.
The treasurer also put $91 million back into the permanent trust funds, completing repayment of some $200 million that was lost through unfavorable business decisions in the 2008 economic downturn ($110 million was repaid in 2010).
“This past year we paid off the remaining $91 million, so that came out of the $770 million,” Walden-Newman said. “We also had some losses that we carried on the books from the crisis … they were about $35 million that we paid off and then we paid the investment managers [$42.4 million]. So what we distributed was $620 million for the fiscal year, which was actually very good considering how horrible it had been a couple of years prior.”
Meyer, meanwhile, was still mad at the losses from the downturn, which he attributed largely to decisions by some of the private investment managers who no longer work for the state.
“I can accept an investment manager losing money with their style, that’s to be expected; you can’t tell markets that much,” Meyer said. “But when they get stupid enough to sell at the bottom of the market, without telling us, I lose my temper and I get mad. They have since apologized to us; I said well it’s a little bit late to apologize to us now.”
The treasurer’s office, in conjunction with the State Land and Investment Board (composed of the state’s top five elected officials, including Meyer), oversee management of the state’s $14.4 billion in established funds, which include the Permanent Wyoming Mineral Trust Fund ($5.3 billion); Hathaway Scholarship Fund ($502.8 million); Higher Education Endowment Fund ($111.5 million); Workers’ Compensation Fund ($1.36 billion); and the Tobacco Settlement Fund ($67.5 million). There’s also the Permanent Land Fund, which is actually three separate funds: the Common School Land Fund ($2.24 billion); University Permanent Land Fund ($18 million); and the Remaining Permanent Land Funds ($122.8 million). In addition, there are a myriad of smaller funding sources in the state (such as the Wildlife Trust Fund) which are combined into what’s called the State Agency Pool, and totals some $4.7 billion.
Some of the funds, such as the Permanent Mineral Trust Fund, the Hathaway Scholarship Fund and the Higher Education Endowment Fund, are “inviolate,” which means once the money is in, it can never come out, the fund, or corpus, can never be allocated. The interest from investment of that money, however, can be spent and pays for programs tied specifically to the fund, such as Hathaway scholarships.
To ensure their inviolability, there are specific guidelines and risk limits for these permanent funds, with the primary objective being to protect the money.
“We just don’t have that many risky investments,” Meyer told the committee. “Actually, when the bottom dropped out in 2007-2008, this very, very conservative portfolio … dropped 11 percent in value. Our retirement system lost 35 percent, and most state and public funds across the United States lost in excess of 30 percent in value. That doesn’t mean that we’re geniuses, it means the type of portfolio that we built has been stretched … I prefer a diversified portfolio.”
Meyer said while there’s caution, there’s also alertness to the market.
“We’ve got some flexibility in there to see what’s really happening in the real world,” Meyer said. “That’s when Mike [Walden-Newman] and R.V. Kuhns [the state’s private investment management firm] get their heads together, and they call the managers, and they say, ‘What do you think is going on?’ It’s a very interactive, very alive process. You know we’re damn fortunate to have money …”
“We’re very conscious in the treasurer’s office that the primary investment portfolio is the protection of the corpus of the funds,” Walden-Newman said. “And secondly, to provide liquidity to meet the state’s needs. And then after those is to provide the highest possible rate of return within the risk parameters … And the risk parameters are set in the asset allocation, and for us the risk parameters are mostly set by the cap placed on equity exposure of 55 percent of the permanent funds, so that we have less volatility in the stock market, and a more reliable and predictable income in the bond market.”
The investment income isn’t only interest or revenues, but also the value of the asset itself, i.e., capital gains (or losses). Meyer said that while the value of many of the stocks, bonds and other assets went up substantially this year, he cautioned that the values go can go down as quickly as they go up. Because of the volatility, “You’ll see a $450 million shift in market value in just one month,” Meyer said as an example. “September was a miserable month, October was a really hot month, so if you ask how much capital gains we can get, I would never expect $450 million in one month, and capital appreciation, but that’s what happened.”
Meyer said they only count capital gains as income in July at the end of the fiscal year, if they cash in. Capital gains also aren’t counted as income for budgeting purposes in the important Consensus Revenue Estimating Group (CREG) report, which is the main benchmark used in developing the state budget.
“Those capital gains haven’t ever been, and won’t be, profiled in the CREG report, but they’ll come to the state …” Meyer said, noting the current policy of the treasurer’s office.
State budgeters, however, are aware it might be there at the end of the fiscal year ($275 million of the $622 million that was distributed to the agencies this past fiscal year came from capital gains).
“Now that can become a serious sum of money come July,” noted Rep. Steve Harshman, R-Natrona, who’s a member of the legislature’s Joint Appropriations Committee.
Another issue that arose in the meeting concerned what are called “reserve accounts,” which are less restricted than the fixed funds, but designated for the same purpose. For instance, if investments from the Hathaway Scholarship Fund come up short to finance all the qualifying students, the reserve account is there to make up the difference.
The reserve accounts generate investment interest as well, which in recent years has gone directly into the state’s General Fund. The committee, however, voted to introduce bills that would have that interest stay with the reserve account in the case of the Hathaway Fund and the Common School Fund.
While the state apparently isn’t projecting a significant increase in investment income this current fiscal year, the funds are still expected to grow.
“I tell people it took Wyoming 113 years to get its first $5 billion in this portfolio,” Walden-Newman said, commenting that was around 2003. “It took five years to get the next $5 billion, so in 2008 we were at $10 billion. And we’re going to be at $15 billion in this portfolio, based on our projections, about this time next year … and on out.”
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