It didn’t sound like much, even at the time. In April 2002 the California Public Employees’ Retirement System invested a total of $50 million with five hedge fund firms. For the then-$235.7 billion CalPERS, the largest state pension plan in the U.S., writing $50 million in checks was hardly a noticeable occurrence. But as the first step in an initial $1 billion allocation, the investment was a monumental moment for the hedge fund industry. It marked one of the first significant commitments by a public pension fund to a program of investing with hedge fund managers, a group that the pension community and its advisers had previously shunned as too risky and secretive. And in ways that are only now starting to become completely clear, it would dramatically change how public pensions invest. CalPERS had good reasons for wanting to get into hedge funds. By 2002 the U.S. stock market, which had overheated during the late 1990s as the mania for technology and telecommunications stocks generated trillions of dollars in paper wealth for individuals and institutions, was plunging in a bear market rout. Like most U.S. public pensions, CalPERS had heavily invested in such securities as part of an outsize allocation to large-cap equities that had made the plan rich during the boom years but hurt on the way down. The fund lost $12.3 billion in the fiscal year ended June 30, 2001, and $9.7 billion the next year. CalPERS had gone from having 110 percent of the assets it needed to meet its future....

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