At 9:45 on a Monday morning in mid-November 2000, the 13 members of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System’s board gathered in a spacious conference room at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, just a few miles from the Los Angeles International Airport. By the time their meeting adjourned seven hours later, they had made a momentous decision: CalPERS would invest $1 billion of its $170 billion in hedge funds.
