Britt Harris went home in 2006 to revive the giant Teacher Retirement System of Texas. After two decades back East, where he’d run Verizon Communications’ pension fund and served as CEO of quantitative investment manager Bridgewater Associates, the Bryan, Texas, native took one look at the more than $100 billion TRS portfolio and saw a dangerously narrow, all-too-basic mix of stocks and bonds that urgently needed a shaking up. Harris had a personal interest at stake: His 73-year-old mother, Allana, a retired fifth-grade science teacher, receives a $1,200 check from TRS each month at her home in Mesquite, Texas.
当他采访首席投资官员时，哈里斯挺直了：他告诉受托人，监督该系统并雇用其CIO和执行董事，只有他才能使其普遍更改。“这不是一个最终的人，但我想提前告诉他们”如果你雇用我，这就是我想做的，“”哈里斯说。“我的方法从来没有递增。”
哈里斯的食谱简单且彻底 - 从普通的香草股和债券多样化为广泛的替代投资，从对冲基金到房地产到商品，并雇用投资组合管理人员。在奥斯汀的内部运行，股票和债券投资以低成本为国内证券的折价率，但在交易新兴市场和其他替代仪器时，留下了不利的TRS。
Revamping a portfolio now worth just under $81 billion and covering 1.2 million active and retired members can’t be done overnight, and today Harris has completed only part of his radical overhaul. From the start he’s had to contend with hothouse local politics, from a meddlesome governor to a legislature wary of potential conflicts of interest or of surrendering too much control. In 2007, the legislature trimmed Harris’s target allocation for hedge funds from 10 percent to 5 percent while authorizing TRS to hire outside managers to run 30 percent of its publicly managed stocks and bonds. (Harris preferred no constraints.)
Still, Harris has been remarkably effective. He has mostly achieved his new allocation goals, placing nearly 58.5 percent of assets in global equities; 22.8 percent in stable value assets, such as long Treasuries and intermediate-maturity government credits, hedge funds and high-yield bonds; and 18.7 percent in real-return assets, including Treasury inflation-protected securities, commodities and real estate.
在这样做时，他对他的同龄人留下了敏锐的印象。“The transformation of Texas TRS has been significant in paving the way for far greater diversification than what has been typical of pension plans and institutional investors more broadly,” notes Russell Read, who stepped down as CIO of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System in June to pursue environmental investing as co-founder of C Change Investments.
沿途哈里斯已成为最强大的美国公共养老金计划CIO之一。2007年，他说服了受托人委员会提出对基金投资专业人员的赔偿 - 包括自己 - 只是在他们最后完成的一年之后。6月份，董事会给哈里斯筹集了17％的筹集人员，并设定了薪酬上限，包括基于绩效的奖金，价值180万美元。这三倍以上，他的前任赚取了哪些，并在美国任何公共养老基金经理的最高赔偿。他的独立同样德克萨斯州大小：受托人赋予他的员工权威，使得私募股权投资高达10亿美元，没有董事会批准。此前，董事会必须批准每项私人投资。
“He came in as the agent of change we had been looking for,” says Dory Wiley, chairman of the trustees’ alternative investments committee and president of Samco Capital Markets, a Dallas-based broker-dealer that serves community banks. “He’s been a bit of a bull in a china shop, but it’s probably the only way to have gotten it done, and he’s done a great job.”
Now, though, the global market upheaval is casting shadows over Harris’s plans. Pension funds throughout the country have been hit hard — mighty CalPERS warned in late October that if it sustains losses of 20 percent or more in the fiscal year ending next June 30, it will need to raise contributions from its public-agency employers. (As of October 28, it was down 29 percent from its year-earlier peak.) Alternatives have been hammered: Commodities are in free fall, real estate values are sinking, and private equity and hedge funds have been whipsawed by the ongoing liquidity crisis.
德克萨斯州养老金信托基金的教师退休系统也受到遭受。截至2008年8月31日，
TRS的资产与负债的比例为90.5％。这比国家退休管理员国家协会履行第125个主要计划之间的总资助比率为86％。但是，TRS的115亿美元的缺点是绝对的术语，而不是全国最大的。该系统的机构警告说，由于确认延期的投资损失，即将到来，即将到来的年度可能会恶化。
Harris contends the moves he has made helped soften the blow; left unchanged, the fund’s legacy portfolio would have lost an additional $400 million during the nine months ended September 30. To be sure, with asset values deteriorating, the final verdict on his strategies is not yet in, a point he readily concedes. “One year does not a long-term track record make,” says Harris. “But the performance is coming in as expected.”
政治风暴也造成干扰。在董事会只占少数，一些民选官员和本地投资者一起，担心，TRS，在得克萨斯州的资产的最大单池，被州长里克·佩里的晃动，谁任命所有九个受托人下日益下降 - 三直接和来自不同选区的被提名者名单中的六个，例如积极的公立学校和大学员工和退休人员。主席以来，自2月份是国家教育委员会的被提名人，是一家杰克·李，这是一个佩里·李，作为经纪人经销商势头证券的创始人在20世纪90年代的一天 - 交易热潮中发出了一笔财富，是前纽约市长的国家财政委员会Rudolph Giuliani’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Perry, a fiscally and socially conservative Republican, became governor in December 2000 after his predecessor, George W. Bush, won the presidency.
“Jim Lee是达拉斯的学区受托人和主管的一切之后的动力。”“我觉得有一群决策者，我不知道那些人是谁，但这不是整个董事会。”
基金内部有很多骑师进行。9月份，5-4投票的受托人任命了Brian Guthrie，这是一个预算助理到佩里，担任副主任的长期空置职位。TRS首席运营官Pattie Featherston，曾与基金合并11年，并申请副董事的工作，在下一个月介绍一下咨询角色。
然后有董事会的信托律师事项。7月，董事会在华盛顿州华盛顿的新郎法律集团IAN LANOFF于8月底举行的董事会申请予以续约，该委员会在华盛顿州的新郎法律集团举行。在他的位置作为信托律师，它选择了Roel Campos，这是证券交易委员会的前成员，他们领导了旧金山的Cooley Goleward Kronish的华盛顿办事处。然后在11月，德克萨斯州委托规委员会的压力Greg Abbott and State Senator Robert Duncan，共和党人，坎波斯，民主党人和选民总统巴拉克奥巴马的顾问，撤回了自己的考虑。董事会随后投票选出摩根，刘易斯＆Bockius的律师事务所，只能在12月17日终止那份合同，因为摩根刘易斯最近在TRS投资交易中违反了另一个TRS客户，违反了国家合同指导方针。
“难题的碎片并不是全部合适，”国家参议员邓肯说，担任国家事务委员会主席，8月召开了听证会进入信托律师的开关。“过度反应很容易，但我宁愿积极主动。”他指出，TRS的扩张权威于2011年出现审查。
Duncan and other officials worry that, even as falling markets threaten TRS’s funding status, the board may be swayed to make politically driven investments. Perry, who plans to run for reelection in 2010, has a history of proposing pet projects to large state funds. In 2003 he urged TRS to consider a plan put forward by UBS vice chairman and former U.S. senator Phil Gramm, a Perry supporter, to buy life insurance on retired educators that would funnel death benefits to the pension fund. In 2006 a Perry aide proposed that TRS invest as much as $600 million in start-up companies funded by the state-run Texas Emerging Technology Fund. Neither proposal was put to a board vote. Now the Texas Department of Transportation is urging TRS to consider investing in private toll roads in Texas, among other infrastructure projects, in a program supported by Perry and other Republican leaders.
批评人士还担心,不断增长的依赖external managers could lead to pay-to-play abuses, in which money managers make campaign contributions in exchange for mandates. As Henry puts it, “We were led to believe there might be less disclosure — that board members would not have to disclose when they had visited with vendors or sat in on meetings where investments are decided.” Campos tells Institutional Investor that he wanted to bring in experts to develop “best practice” policies and says any suggestion he would facilitate anyone’s political agenda is an insult to his reputation and absurd, given that he has never met Perry and had been a champion of investor rights while serving on the SEC.
State legislators recognized a decade ago that the pension fund was overexposed to domestic stocks, but tensions with TRS hampered diversification efforts. Although the legislature in 1999 authorized putting up to 4 percent of assets into private equity and hedge funds, it kept the fund on a tight leash.
在20世纪90年代初，在TRS越过政治时，在TRS的高管们恼火了立法者，与工会游说立法者合作促进福利。Lawmakers were stunned by a 1993 report by then–attorney general Dan Morales that found “pervasive conflicts of interest” in TRS’s real estate operations — including instances in which consultants paid for TRS staff junkets to Las Vegas and overseas — that might have contributed to nearly $500 million in losses in the 1980s. The report detailed lavish spending by TRS, including $18.7 million to build a new headquarters in Austin with a fortresslike façade and a soaring marble-lined lobby and $1 million more for furniture, artwork, a weight room, a greenhouse and other items.
TRS, which was mostly passively managed and in stocks and bonds, performed well in the late-1990s boom: Assets climbed from $62.2 billion in August 1997 to $90.0 billion in 2000. What’s more, the in-house approach meant the cost of running the portfolio was minimal — only about 2 basis points annually, says executive director Ronnie Jung, Harris’s boss.
TRS在2000年将其第一次陷入替代方案，以立法批准，但慢慢移动，因为它缺乏必要的人力和系统。然后科技泡沫爆发，资产陷入困境。2005年，总督佩里更换了TRS董事会Ellis Ellis埃利斯，该合作伙伴是休斯顿的尼古拉斯 - Applegate资本管理的退休董事会埃利斯，哈雷斯韦尔·帕特森休斯顿办公室律师贾维斯·霍林斯沃斯特（TracewellingWort），现在是Bracewell＆Giuliani。（佩里，如李，在今年的Gop Primaries中支持朱利亚尼。）2006年3月，当詹姆斯·赫尔离开德克萨斯州基督教大学的捐赠时，CIO职位开放了。
输入哈里斯。
每天我上班的时候，我有120万人思考，“哈里斯说。“对我来说，他们做了什么以及他们有多重要，因为我所要做的就是想到我的母亲。”哈里斯，50岁，在他的办公室里一直保持着拇指圣经，与父亲继承了福音派的热情。从三岁到八岁，哈里斯住在土耳其安卡拉，他的父亲是一个莫罗利石油公司的执行官。这个家庭于1966年重新安置到美国，在康涅狄格州安顿下来。一年后，在33岁时，他的父亲被诊断出患有脊髓癌并经历了巨大的变化。“他觉得他对该部致力于戏剧性的呼唤，”哈里斯说。这个家庭搬到了堡垒价值，哈里斯的长老成为浸信会传教士。
“I went from living in something that was close to a mansion to a home that was essentially a shotgun tract house, and my dad went from being a senior vice president of Mobil Oil to selling insurance door to door, with my brother and me tagging along, to try to make ends meet,” Harris recalls. “I remember that as a very pleasant time.”
哈里斯于1980年赢得了德克萨斯州A＆M大学的财务学位，并担任德克萨斯州公用事业公司养老基金的一份分析师，现于TXU公司于1988年 - 他父亲在53岁时去世的那一年 - 哈里斯搬到了康涅狄格州。He spent three years helping to run the U.S. arm of the pension plan at ABB, the Swedish-Swiss power and engineering conglomerate, then became a portfolio manager at the then–$10 billion pension fund of GTE Corp., which merged with Bell Atlantic Corp. in 2000 to form Verizon. In 1995, Harris and his boss, GTE Investment Management Corp. president John Carroll, began to establish long-term strategic partnerships with fund managers. The idea was to give them broad discretion, instead of narrowly defined mandates, and to align incentives with performance fees. The clutch of managers — Goldman Sachs Asset Management, J.P. Morgan Investment Management, Morgan Stanley Investment Management and Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo & Co. — provided diversification and market insight. The strategic partner concept has been emulated by many public pension funds, including public retirement systems in Arizona and South Carolina, and by the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp.
哈里斯说，当他离开2005年时，投资组合有500亿美元的界定福利资产，并是一项一致的顶级表演者。verizon发言人表示，这家原始资产管理公司是六个当前的战略合作伙伴。但是，今天的计划“是不同的方法，设计和关系，你不会认识到这一点，”发言人说，削弱了详细说明。
哈里斯离开Verizon成为Bridgewater Associates的首席执行官，这是一个替代工具，现在在管理层下拥有约800亿美元的资产。哈里斯是Co-Cios Robert Prince and Ray Dalio的朋友，他创立了坚定的韦斯特波特，康涅狄格州。但他只呆了五个月了。这份工作却留下了很多客户Schmoozing，哈里斯解释说，这使它变得糟糕。
Back home in Texas, Harris says he concluded that the TRS leadership “had not thought deeply enough about the way they’re diversified.” Harris designed a portfolio that would provide diversification across all market and macroeconomic conditions, in part through alternatives. But the wary legislature didn’t give him carte blanche.
“Politicians are always worried about public perception,” says Dan Gattis, a Republican state representative.“What are we really opening up our tax dollars to be invested in?”
在哈里斯抵达之前，该基金已向国内股权分配了52％，达到了15％的国际股票;固定收入包括27％且替代资产4％，现金占余额。“我们的主要分配仍然在这一长期股权的世界中，”哈里斯说，但我们在最近的股权世界并不赞成时，我们的期间我们更好多样化。“他补充说，他的新战略旨在提供较高的波动率的回报：每年的预计8.72％，比以前的分配好99个基点。
他曾经在Verizon的方法后,哈里斯brought prospective strategic partners — four of the biggest names in finance — to Austin in April. In a wood-paneled room at Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar downtown, Perry, Harris and Hollingsworth, who left the board in February, joined several other trustees to dine with CEOs John Mack of Morgan Stanley, Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers and Lawrence Fink of BlackRock as well as Jes Staley, head of JPMorgan Asset Management. Soon after that night, each firm got $1 billion to manage in a strategy that essentially clones Texas’s portfolio. “This is called Texas hospitality,” says Harris about the dinner. “Also, from a practical point of view, it was a way to make sure that we didn’t have anybody miss the board meeting at 8:00 the next morning.”
基本管理费用与性能密切对齐 - 从少到20个基点到高达85个基点。哈里斯还将公司视为其95人奥斯汀员工的信息资源，该员工将继续管理70％的公开交易资产。除了跟踪华尔街公司超重或超重不同的资产课程外，他们还可以致电货币管理者并提出问题。哈里斯预计TRS将获得分析和交易软件和专有交易 - 例如6月份的投资2.5亿美元，在一个Blackrock基金中，可在5月份从瑞银获得150亿美元的苦恼债务。
“大多数金融界都设立了相当于一夜情的人，”哈里斯观察。“他们将与您进行交易并继续前进。没有什么可以积累。但我们将致力于几个联合研究项目，并确实相互了解。“
It’s not clear, though, how far these synergies will develop.
(The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers has forced TRS to reassess that relationship. Investment managers led by CEO George Walker [see related story, page 89] will acquire Lehman’s asset management business, which was not part of the bankruptcy proceedings. TRS says it is committed to its strategic relationship with the new entity, called Neuberger Investment Management.)
哈里斯坚持认为，10亿美元“是四个中的每一个的重要账户。”尽管如此，他提议向管理人员提供更多资本，只能被他的董事会拒绝。4月份，受托人在哈里斯造成了办公建议时，允许各个外部管理人员投资多达5％的TRS资产。这可以给出战略合作伙伴，每个人都可以管理50亿美元。“这让我感到惊讶，”Trs Trustee Henry说。“我的感觉是，”你有十亿，现在证明你能做什么。“亨利有另一个问题：他说他挺身而出，他没有意识到牛排屋吃饭，直到它发生在发生后的第二天，在他被投票分配最初的10亿美元的任务后不久。
总而言之，哈里斯已将最多30％的基金资产与外部管理人员放置在大约一半。通过严格的九个月的流程选择了四个战略合作伙伴，他们的选择被委员会批准。TRS一直在执行几十名额外管理人员的尽职调查，并期望在明年夏天达到外面的资产水平达到20％。
哈里斯说，他认为他试图保持在政治战争之上，留住董事会和政治家的强大支持。尽管投资损失，即使在持不同同缔约方董事会成员和邓肯等立法者中，他的新战略已经节省了数亿美元的广泛致谢。
TRS is trying to manage political risks. Under a new incentive compensation scheme, Harris and other staffers won’t get bonuses for having outperformed their benchmarks this year; payments will be deferred for a year because the fund lost money. In September, Harris held an unprecedented conference call with TRS members to assuage concerns related to the demise of Lehman and other Wall Street events. TRS and Harris went on the road in October and November to deliver “report cards” on their new strategy to the state’s teachers and the public at large.
“人们正在密切关注，”哈里斯说。“我们将要出去告诉我们的故事。”