< The 2014 Pension 40: The Battle Is On
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Ted Eliopoulos
Chief Investment Officer
California Public Employees’ Retirement System
PNR
Ted Eliopoulos knows firsthand the value of a good pension. “Growing up in a teacher’s family, I saw the importance of these defined benefit plans,” says Eliopoulos, whose father taught physical education at a junior high school in San Francisco. “They are central to teachers and firefighters and police, and how they plan for their retirement security.” As chief investment officer of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the 50-year-old former real estate lawyer is in a position to have a big impact on that security. CalPERS has 1.68 million retirement plan members and pays nearly $13 billion in annual benefits, two thirds of which comes from investment earnings on its $300 billion in assets. Eliopoulos, who has a BA in comparative literature from Dartmouth College and a JD from the University of Virginia, joined CalPERS in January 2007 to head its real estate division and served as acting CIO in 2013 while then-CIO Joseph Dear was undergoing cancer treatment. The system’s board of administration appointed him interim CIO following Dear’s February 2014 death. In September the board made the move permanent, just two days after announcing that CalPERS was getting out of hedge funds. “At $4 billion, our hedge fund program was too small to make a difference,” says Eliopoulos, who led the review, which determined that hedge funds would need to make up 10 percent of the overall portfolio to have a meaningful impact. “We just couldn’t get comfortable that we could construct a portfolio at that scale and be comfortable with the amount of complexity that would underlie it.”
The 2014 Pension 40
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| Bruce Rauner Illinois | John and Laura Arnold Laura and John Arnold Foundation | Randi Weingarten American Federation of Teachers | Rahm Emanuel Chicago | David Boies Boies, Schiller & Flexner |
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| Randy DeFrehn National Coordinating Committee for Multiemployer Plans | Damon Silvers AFL-CIO | Laurence Fink BlackRock | Chris Christie New Jersey | Robin Diamonte United Technologies Corp. |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| Ted Eliopoulos California Public Employees’ Retirement System | John Kline Minnesota | J. Mark Iwry U.S. Treasury Department | Gina Raimondo Rhode Island | Phyllis Borzi U.S. Labor Department |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| Orrin Hatch Utah | Abigail Johnson Fidelity Investments | Ted Wheeler Oregon | Caitlin Long Morgan Stanley | James Hoffa International Brotherhood of Teamsters |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| Amy Kessler Prudential Financial | Alejandro García Padilla Puerto Rico | Christopher Klein U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Caifornia | Steven Rhodes Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Michigan | Kevin de León California |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
| David Draine Pew Charitable Trusts | Jordan Marks National Public Pension Coalition | Sam Liccardo California | Joshua Rauh Stanford Graduate School of Business | Karen Ferguson and Karen Friedman Pension Rights Center |
| 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 |
| Timothy Blake Moody’s Investors Service | Kathleen Kennedy Townsend Center for Retirement Initiatives, Georgetown University | Edward (Ted) Siedle Benchmark Financial Services | Daniel Loeb Third Point | Judy Mares Employee Benefits Security Administration, U.S. Labor Department |
| 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 |
| Andrew Biggs American Enterprise Institute | Andy Stern Columbia University | Kenneth Mehlman KKR & Co. | Teresa Ghilarducci New School for Social Research | A. Melissa Moye U.S. Treasury Department |
