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Articles by Charles Millard
This father of nine says: ‘Have more kids’
This father of nine says: ‘Have more kids’ (washingtonpost.com) This father of nine says: ‘Have more kids’ By Charles E.F. Millard 2026061910160300 I know a little bit about pensions and politics, but I know a lot about having and raising kids. My wife and I have been blessed with nine children, each one a unique, irreplaceable miracle. We're all too familiar with what many people think. "Surely you're joking," some say when they learn that our house could field a baseball team.
Trump May Turn Your 401(k) Into an Old-Fashioned Pension
The Trump administration has just issued its proposed rule on the use of alternative assets in 401(k) plans, and it’s a game changer. It is trying to make your 401(k) more like a traditional pension plan. This rule encourages providing lifetime income and better risk-adjusted returns that can make retirement better for millions of Americans. You’d never know it from the criticism by the left.
Commentary: In-plan lifetime income solutions should be the default
Breadcrumb Home INDUSTRY VOICES May 07, 2025 09:01 AM Tweet Share Share Email More Reprints Print Photo: Vincent Ricardel Charles E.F. Millard What is the most important characteristic of a lifetime income solution for DC plans? There are many considerations in selecting an in-plan lifetime income solution. They include longevity risk, tax implications, total accumulation value, guaranteed income vs. non-guaranteed, etc. But the crucial question is: will it help the majority of plan participants?
Commentary: Thinking of adding alternatives to your defined contribution plan? Here are some first steps
Breadcrumb Home INDUSTRY VOICES October 30, 2024 08:01 AM Tweet Share Share Email More Reprints Print From left: Charles E.F. Millard and Clinton S. Cary Alternative assets can play a very useful role in 401(k) plans and other defined contribution plans. And plan sponsors are increasingly considering using them in target-date funds, multiasset funds and managed accounts.
Surrealism at 100: A Reading List
The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. On October 15, 1924, French poet André Breton published his Manifeste du surréalisme, arguing for a new form of literary creation that would unlock the subconscious. He defined Surrealism as “pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express…the real process of thought. It is the dictation of thought, free from any control by reason and of any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.” Breton’s publication was actually a bit belated.
Why Not Pool Longevity Risk with Lifetime Income Solutions?
Think of all the risks we insure and think of how we do it. We insure against the risk of premature death by pooling mortality risk by buying life insurance. We insure against liability for automobile accidents by pooling that risk. We insure against fire and similar damage to our homes by pooling risk. We insure against catastrophic medical bills by pooling health care risks and costs. These are all routine forms of insurance that make perfect sense to most people.
Why We Should Pool Longevity Risk with Lifetime Income Solutions
Think of all the risks we insure and how we do it. We insure against the risk of premature death by pooling mortality risk with life insurance. We insure against liability for automobile accidents by pooling that risk. We insure against fire and similar damage to our homes by pooling risk. We insure against catastrophic medical bills by pooling health care risks and costs. These are all routine forms of insurance that make perfect sense for most people. So why don’t we do more to pool longevity risk?
Commentary: Private equity - target-date funds should give it a 'secondary' thought
Breadcrumb Home INDUSTRY VOICES April 15, 2024 07:01 AM Tweet Share Share Email More Reprints Photo: Vincent Ricardel Charles E.F. Millard Participants in 401(k) plans are generally long-term investors. Yet, most 401(k)s have no investment in an excellent long-term asset class: private equity — more specifically, secondary private equity. Today the vast majority of 401(k) and other defined contribution participants are in target-date funds.
A Case for Prudent Diversification in DC Plans
It has been three and a half years since the Department of Labor published its letter indicating that alternative investments can play a useful role in target-date funds. It has been two years since the DOL reiterated that guidance in December 2021. Yet alternative assets are still underutilized.
One Piece of a UAW Strike Solution: Lifetime Income
During its strike, one of the UAW's demands has been that the auto companies restore traditional pensions. Less well-known, but noted in published reports, is that the negotiations have also contemplated adding a lifetime income option in their 401(k) plans. It should be a no-brainer for auto companies because numerous lifetime income solutions are available. The auto companies and thousands of other employers should use them.
CalPERS CIO Nicole Musicco Will Step Down
Corporate MovesSeptember 15, 2023 Musicco cites family needs as the reason for her departure; the funds deputy CIO to serve as interim head. The California Public Employees’ Retirement System announced the departure of Nicole Musicco, the fund’s CIO, effective September 29. Musicco cited attending to the “immediate needs of family” in Toronto as her reason for leaving CalPERS.
PBGC Premiums and Washington’s Fuzzy Math
Home > News > Opinion > PBGC Premiums and Washington’s Fuzzy Math OpinionSeptember 15, 2023 Billions that Congress counts as revenue are contributing to the demise of traditional pension funds.
Commentary: Corporate pension plans can learn lessons from banks' challenges
Corporate pension plans can learn a couple of things from the challenges that plagued Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic Bank earlier this year. First, and perhaps obviously, smaller banks experienced how an asset-liability mismatch can cause a lightning-quick run. Naturally, they are going to be less likely (and less willing) to lend if they are uncertain regarding future funding sources.
Portability Is Key to Lifetime Income Solutions
More than three-quarters of employers say they are highly interested in incorporating a lifetime income solution into their plan. However, one important need must be met before realizing widespread adoption: easy portability of the lifetime benefit. This issue is a crucial element to solving the retirement income crisis our country faces. The portability challenge confronts three distinct constituencies in the world of retirement: employers, their advisors, and participants themselves.
Time for SECURE 3.0
In late December 2022, Congress and the White House passed the legislation that has been nicknamed SECURE 2.0. There is much to celebrate but, once the victory lap is over, there is much more to be done. America has a retirement crisis, and SECURE 2.0 takes some important steps to address it. It allows people to save longer in defined contribution retirement plans before required minimum distributions kick in.
Commentary: Public pension staff pay needs less politics
It may be politically unpopular to say this, but the investment staff at public pension funds should be paid more. Much more. This can be a hard argument to make, because pension investment managers generally make much more than the public employees whose pensions they help provide. For example, teachers' average annual pay, even in the highest paying states, is generally below $90,000, while a portfolio manager at a public pension plan can earn over $200,000. But that is the wrong comparison.
Commentary: One size will not fit all when investing PBGC financial assistance
Stakeholders argued variously and vigorously for a permissible allocation to "return-seeking assets." To its credit, the PBGC and the Biden administration listened and made changes that are now expressed in the final rule. The most significant change is that up to 33% of the SFA funds may be invested in return-seeking assets (essentially, public equities).
Commentary: Finding common ground politically with ESG
The degree of specificity and granularity asked for in the SEC's current proposal put forth in March is quite extensive and will likely be diluted in a final regulation. At its heart, the regulation would require disclosure of climate-related risks, which the company would have to identify are having or will likely have a material impact on the company's business and on its consolidated financial statements, and the effect of climate-related risks on the company's business model and strategy.
Commentary: Teamwork needed to solve PBGC's multiemployer puzzle
The United States Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. faces a quandary. In turn, that quandary is faced by the sponsors of some of the struggling plans that the PBGC insures. As a consequence, that challenge is also affecting the investment managers who seek to manage pension fund assets. In short, that quandary is how to make 2% equal 5.5%. The American Rescue Plan Act tried to address the issue of chronic underfunding in the most-at-risk ("critical and declining") multiemployer pension plans.
The 'Prudent Person' Should Include Alternatives In Target Date Funds
If you participate in most 401(k) or other defined contribution retirement plans, you should be angry. Almost every investor class in the world except yours has access to alternative investments—including private equity, private real estate and hedge funds. Alternative assets can strengthen and diversify retirement portfolios. They can enhance returns and dampen risk. Yet the vast majority of employers do not use or offer them in their DC plans, even if their traditional defined benefit plans do.
If you want to improve the environment, invest in companies that are improving
Pensions and other institutional investors are increasingly focused on ESG investing. But what is the point of ESG investing?Obviously, the investing part of that question is focused on a fair return, and potentially some alpha, to the investor. But the ESG part of the question has numerous potential goals. Among those are avoiding harm, mitigating ESG-related investment risk, rewarding strong ESG performance, and encouraging improvement in corporate behavior.
Opinion: Queen Elizabeth and the future of U.S. retirement reform
With Queen Elizabeth’s “Royal Assent,” the United Kingdom recently adopted groundbreaking pension legislation allowing the creation of Collective Defined Contribution (CDC) pension plans. Research shows these “pooled” plans have the potential to generate substantially better retirement income. In the wake of passage of the SECURE Act of 2019 in the US, strong bipartisan support remains in Congress for additional reforms to expand access to savings and support lifetime income.
Public Pension Plans Are Thirsty for Liquidity
The Chicago River flows backward. Due to a feat of civil engineering completed around 1900, it flows backward. Its liquidity goes the wrong way. Unfortunately, that is what is happening for the Chicago municipal pension system, too. Its liquidity is flowing the wrong way. Chicago’s municipal pension plan recently redeemed $50 million from a large-cap equity fund. Seems like a non-event. Happens all the time.
Florida’s public pension plan works just fine. But lawmakers need to fully fund it
Some Florida lawmakers want to stop providing a public pension to new government employees. Getty Images The Florida Senate is considering a bill to eliminate the state’s pension plan for new workers. This is a bad idea. Working for the state does not provide high salaries or bonuses, but it has traditionally provided a secure retirement. There are three particular arguments used to support changing the system. Each of them is just plain wrong. 1.
Commentary: It’s time to make 401(k) plans into real pension plans
Throughout the presidential campaign, during the transition and at his inauguration, Joe Biden has consistently said he wants to renew bipartisanship in Washington. But the first step is finding something both parties can agree on. Fortunately, that challenge is not as monumental as it might seem.
5 Key Factors to Consider About In-Plan Lifetime Income Solutions
When the SECURE Act was signed into law in December of 2019, it seemed that plan sponsors would be focused on lifetime income solutions in 2020. Then COVID-19 struck.
Retirement Policy and Washington Politics Don’t Always Mix
It’s election time, so a lot of ideas are being thrown around. Retirement policy might not seem like the most gripping topic of the moment, but there are a few proposals out there. Two in particular deserve comment. One is a good idea—the other is a clunker. The good idea is a national automatic individual retirement account (IRA). The clunker is reducing tax incentives for 401(k)s and similar retirement savings vehicles. The auto-IRA is long overdue.
Commentary: Make pension plan relief permanent to strengthen the system
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell have both said that they believe Congress will need to pass additional coronavirus-related economic stimulus legislation. In the meantime, the House of Representatives has already passed such a bill that includes temporary relief from numerous burdens. Among those burdens is one that Congress itself has placed on pension plans in the past.
Commentary: Don’t be insecure about the SECURE Act
There are three characteristics necessary for a sound retirement system: sustainability, professional liability-focused investment management and pooling of risks. These are the traits that make a retirement system work. Unfortunately, the 401(k) system in the U.S. currently lacks each of these traits.
Time to Allow 401(k) Plans to Invest In Alternative Assets
Time to Allow 401(k) Plans to Invest In Alternative Assets If employers, defined benefit pensions, and wealthy individuals can invest in these important, diversifying asset classes, then middle class investors should be allowed to do so too. Read Full Article »
Allow 401(k) plans to invest in alternative assets
In May of this year, the House of Representatives passed retirement legislation known as the the SECURE Act, by a vote of 417 to 3. If political stars and impeachment schedules align, that legislation may pass the Senate before the end of the year. It would achieve important goals, such as encouraging lifetime income solutions and allowing the creation of groups of small businesses that can offer 401(k)s together.
Congress may pass retirement reforms that are bipartisan. But they need to go further
After years of inaction, it looks like both parties and both Houses in Congress may come together this year to pass important legislation to improve retirement security. The bills under consideration in Washington make good progress, but they fall short of the real innovation needed. The best pension systems in the world, those in the Netherlands and Denmark, offer examples that Congress can follow.
Commentary: What should due diligence do?
When institutional investors decide to carry out their fiduciary obligations by investing assets with an investment manager, how do they know what they are getting? Or, to put it another way: What should due diligence do? Ten years after the global financial crisis, what have we learned about due diligence?
Nostalgia in Venice by Dominic Green - The New Criterion
he Doge’s Palace, Ruskin wrote in 1851, was the “central building of the world,” because it reconciled Arabic, Byzantine, and Romanesque elements in “exactly equal proportions.” Though Ruskin did not see the Great Exhibition, that other central building of the Victorian world, Karl Marx did visit the steel and glass shrine to capital in Hyde Park: the first of the global trade fairs and the progenitor of the Venice Biennale.
The condescending smile of the supreme enchanter
Opinions about all writers are divided; even Shakespeare has had his detractors, from Voltaire to Tolstoy. But on few writers are they as widely and evenly divided as on Vladimir Nabokov. From some, he commands a vassal’s fealty; from others, he elicits shudders of revulsion. Philip Rahv, no flighty hothead in his mature years, kept passionately urging me to perform radical surgery on Nabokov’s reputation, which he considered as hypertrophic as the man’s ego.
Vulgarity, novelty, and politics in contemporary art
Comparatively few people care for art at all, and most of them care for it because they mistake it for something else. —Arthur Symons Recent attitudes toward art have thrust what has traditionally been known as high art into the shade, and placed its admirers on the defensive. While this situation is sensed as a unique crisis by many, it is in fact the continuation of a long development.
Facing the music by Kyle Smith
The Fossil watch company shall be hearing from my attorneys in short order. At the conclusion of a performance of Disco Pigs (at the Irish Rep through March 4), the timepiece on my wrist indicated that only seventy-five minutes had passed. Preposterous. Surely seventy-five hours had gone by, hence my forthcoming legal claim against the watch manufacturer.
Dick Allen, 1939–2017 by David Yezzi
We at The New Criterion were greatly saddened by the recent passing of the poet Dick Allen, a valued friend of the magazine and a recent winner of The New Criterion Poetry Prize. We were proud to publish his winning collection, This Shadowy Place (2014), one of his very finest collections and one of the strongest collections in the series. Though I saw him far too infrequently, I always relished my exchanges with him. He was an exceedingly warm and thoughtful man.
Commentary: Advantages of pooling are too great to ignore
More than 50 million working Americans have no workplace retirement plan, and many states are developing "Secure Choice" legislation, creating publicly run defined contribution systems to address this problem. Similarly, many states are moving from defined benefit plans for public employees to create another form of publicly run DC plans. The creation of Secure Choice systems helps solve a pressing problem, and moving toward DC plans from DB plans may help alleviate liability pressure on states.
Ohio.com
Jerry vs. Kurt: Cowboys to face Cardinals in hall game (AP Photo/Ron Jenkins, File) CANTON, Ohio (AP) Dallas and Arizona will play in the Hall of Fame game on Aug. 3. With Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and former Cardinals quarterback Kurt Warner being inducted into the hall this year, the matchup makes sense. For the first time, the game will be played on a Thursday night, two days before the induction ceremony. It will be the sixth appearance in the game for the Cowboys and the fifth for the Cardinals.
Bill to allow medical marijuana on ag land is half-baked
The Frederick County Council recently considered requests to build pharmaceutical facilities on land zoned for agriculture (Bill 16-12). This would break commitments in the master plan and be a reversal for elected leaders who ran on promises of controlling ad hoc development. One site proposed for industrial development is in the Maryland Historical Trust as the 1840 Samuel Nusbaum Farmstead.Political stakes are higher because this medicine is marijuana.Our county farm bureau is not being fooled.
Savor Father's Day Contest
Ohio.com, Ohio's leading site for entertainment contest and recreation fun.
Everybody in the (Risk) Pool
The U.S. faces a retirement crisis. We are living longer. Defined-benefit pensions are disappearing; the ones that exist are underfunded. Forty-five million Americans have no retirement plan at all. And nobody is seriously discussing solutions. We urgently need a better retirement system, and luckily it’s still possible to develop one.
Everybody in the (risk) pool
The U.S. faces a retirement crisis. We are living longer. Defined-benefit pensions are disappearing; the ones that exist are underfunded. Forty-five million Americans have no retirement plan at all. And nobody is seriously discussing solutions. We urgently need a better retirement system, and luckily it’s still possible to develop one.
Everybody in the (risk) pool
The U.S. faces a retirement crisis. We are living longer. Defined-benefit pensions are disappearing; the ones that exist are underfunded. Forty-five million Americans have no retirement plan at all. And nobody is seriously discussing solutions. We urgently need a better retirement system, and luckily it’s still possible to develop one.
The Case for Hybrid Corporate Pensions
We are living longer. Defined-benefit pensions are disappearing; the ones that exist are underfunded. Forty-five million Americans have no retirement plan at all. And nobody is seriously discussing solutions. We urgently need a better retirement system, and luckily it's still possible to develop one. It is a mark of advancing civilization that nations, employers and local governments now make commitments to provide security and comfort in old age, but those commitments are becoming more expensive.
Everybody in the (Risk) Pool
We are living longer. Defined-benefit pensions are disappearing; the ones that exist are underfunded. Forty-five million Americans have no retirement plan at all. And nobody is seriously discussing solutions. We urgently need a better retirement system, and luckily it's still possible to develop one. It is a mark of advancing civilization that nations, employers and local governments now make commitments to provide security and comfort in old age, but those commitments are becoming more expensive.
Everybody in the (risk) pool
We are living longer. Defined-benefit pensions are disappearing; the ones that exist are underfunded. Forty-five million Americans have no retirement plan at all. And nobody is seriously discussing solutions. Generational risk is the possibility that, just when you need your savings, markets crash or perform poorly for many years. If you manage your own retirement savings and markets tank right around the time you retire, tough on you.
Akron Beacon Special Sections
Ohio.com, Ohio's leading site for news, sports, entertainment, lifestyle, and community happenings from around the state.
Akron Beacon Special Sections
Ohio.com, Ohio's leading site for news, sports, entertainment, lifestyle, and community happenings from around the state.
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