The NMI Retirement Fund has recovered most of the losses from the stock market crash last week, but it is still eyeing the situation closely.<\/p>\n
Fund Administrator Mark Aguon said the market crisis, when it first hit last week, wiped out about $30 million of the Fund\u2019s investments. But the Fund eventually got its money back and, as of Tuesday, has cut its losses down to $9 million.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe market has been stabilizing, so we\u2019re probably down by even less as of today,\u201d said Aguon. \u201cIf this continues\u2014as we hope it will\u2014we should be able to recover all of our losses by the end of the month. It doesn\u2019t look like we\u2019re going to take such a big hit after all.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet, he also said the Fund will continue to watch the volatile market closely.<\/p>\n
Juan T. Guerrero, chairman of the Fund board of trustees, echoed Aguon\u2019s optimism, citing recent efforts by the U.S. federal government to intervene in the crisis.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe federal government is trying to solve the crisis,\u201d Guerrero said. \u201cI don\u2019t think the federal government will allow the market to just deteriorate. Our only worry is if they [U.S. politicians] make this a political thing. If that happens, we can\u2019t do anything. We\u2019re mandated by law to invest.\u201d<\/p>\n
Richard Villagomez, investment director at the Fund, reported yesterday that the Fund\u2019s investment portfolio was worth $418.75 million in July 2008. This represents about 42 percent of the Fund\u2019s accrued liability, which amounts to $987.15 million.<\/p>\n
The Fund\u2019s assets have been on a downslide since 2006. In that year, the central government stopped contributing to the pension program, forcing the Fund to liquidate assets to make pension payments. In fiscal year 2008, the Retirement Fund withdrew $35 million, which is approximately half of the amount needed to pay retirees.<\/p>\n
According to an actuarial study of the pension plan, if the Fund continues to liquidate assets at this rate\u2014while failing to collect any amount from the government\u2014the program could go bankrupt in eight years.<\/p>\n
In related news, the Fund board of trustees has put off its plan to replace Merrill Lynch as its investment custodian. Guerrero said the board made the decision following some disagreements with its top choice firm. The firm\u2019s proposed contract contained provisions and costs that were different from what the parties agreed upon during initial talks.<\/p>\n
As investment custodian, Merrill Lynch supervises the Fund\u2019s nine money managers\u2014Atalanta, Stralem, Renaissance, Nicolas-Applegate, Fisher, Templeton, Richmond, Income Research, and JP Morgan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The NMI Retirement Fund has recovered most of the losses from the stock market crash last week, but it is still eyeing the situation closely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-126577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126577\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}