Garden State Loses $5 Billion
July 16, 2008
New Jersey State’s pension fund saw its portfolio take a $5 billion hit during the last fiscal year, according to a release issued by the New Jersey Department of Treasury.
The New Jersey Division of Investment (DOI) reported that the fund was down by 3.0% for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2008, bringing its total assets to $77.7 billion.
“While a negative total return is always disappointing, the actions taken by the Division and the Council prevented our performance from being much worse,” said William Clark, director of the DOI, in the release. “If the portfolio’s asset allocation had not been diversified away from its historic concentration purely on equities and bonds, we estimate that the portfolio would have returned -6.68% for the fiscal year assuming we had generated the same performance for our domestic and international equity portfolios. Expressed in dollars, this means that the portfolio would have a current value of only $74.8 billion, or $2.9 billion less than the estimated June 30, 2008 market value.”
The fund diversified its portfolio in 2004 to include investments in real estate, private equity, absolute return strategies and hedge funds (See IMW, 11/14/04).
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