Mark Carney’s ‘forward guidance’: from rebalancing to fingers crossed

Craig Berry - Pensions Policy Officer at the TUC

Whether or not quantitative easing has been a good or a bad thing for pension funds is a complicated issue: defined contribution savers close to retirement have been badly affected by the Bank buying gilts, because they tend to be heavily exposed to gilts, and annuity rates are closely related to gilt yields. Defined benefit funds, which provide guaranteed pensions to their members, are likely to have benefited as much from increased asset values among their equity stock as they have lost from increased liabilities relating to the impact of QE on gilt yields.

However, one issue that has received comparably fewer headlines is the impact that lower interest rates (which are of course partly sustained by QE) are having on pension funds, and in particular the resulting impact of inflation (because sustaining low interest rates means tolerating higher inflation).

The forward guidance tacitly accepts a high-inflation environment. I think this leads to a triple whammy of negative effects for defined benefit pension funds. Firstly, their liabilities are greater because pensions in payment must be increased in line with inflation. Inflation is not necessarily bad for funds –but it is when we are seeing sluggish growth in the economy so their investment returns are not keeping pace.

Secondly, because liabilities are higher, the need to adopt liability-matching investment strategies is more pronounced. This means investing in gilts – at a time when low interest rates make gilts unattractive. The stable returns offered by gilts make them ideal for tracking inflation-linked liabilities, but because gilt yields are (artificially) low, funds are seemingly over-exposing their portfolios to this asset class and missing out on much-needed higher returns from riskier investments.

Thirdly, because mechanisms for discounting liabilities are rightly linked to the assets held, over-exposure to low-yield gilts means that liability values have to be increased.

The forward guidance not only extends, for at least three years, the impact of this environment on pension funds. I think we might end up viewing it as an enormous missed opportunity to utilise pension fund investments in rebalancing the economy.

Pension funds hold assets worth around  95 per cent of UK GDP (the vast majority in defined benefit, at the moment). It is this immense size that found pension fund investments at the heart of the government’s 2010 National Infrastructure Plan (a centrepiece of recovery through rebalancing, albeit little more than a  wish-list). In contrast to the hundreds of billions required, the flagship Pension Infrastructure Platform has just £1billion in ‘soft commitments’ from pension funds– and much of this from public sector schemes (i.e. local government), and the quasi-public Pension Protection Fund.

It would be wrong to conclude that pension funds are not interested in infrastructure investment. Many see this asset class as the ideal form of high-yield, long-term investment suitable for funds with long-term obligations. But most private sector funds are simply not in a position to take on the short-term volatility in returns that infrastructure investment also entails.

The government recently ‘updated’ the flailing infrastructure plan with £40 billion in lending guarantees for ‘shovel-ready’ projects. But even this limited funding comes with so many strings attached it was clearly designed to generate headlines rather than new investment. As Stephanie Flanders remarked:

To qualify, a project has to be perfect in every possible respect, but somehow not quite perfect enough to get up and running entirely on its own.

A far more radical way of getting pension funds to invest significantly in infrastructure is for government to issue ‘infrastructure bonds’. They would presumably be higher-yielding than regular gilts for investors, but over a longer time-horizon. The government would use the cash raised for public infrastructure investment. I’m certain the Treasury have toyed with this idea – but must have concluded that it involves taking too much debt onto the balance-sheet, even though any half-decent economic assessment would demonstrate how valuable it could be for economic growth.

It is of course too simplistic to say that monetary policy must be transformed immediately for the sake of pension funds, even if the potential for wider economic benefit is there. Indeed, changes within pensions policy (for instance, reforming the way that pension fund deficits are valued and reported) would go some way to achieving the same ends. Yet it seems certain that low interest rates – arguably necessary for business but also fuelling house price inflation – are narrowing pension funds’ room for manoeuvre at the same time as directly harming their asset base.

As Ed Balls has pointed out, in the absence of stronger fiscal policy, monetary policy is being asked to bear an impossible weight. The Bank cannot do right for doing wrong. One solution might have been to empower the institutional investors, like pension funds, who could have been in a position to mitigate structural flaws in the UK economy’s capital allocation mechanisms – but they will find very little comfort in the forward guidance.

Dr Craig Berry is Pensions Policy Officer at the TUC. He worked previously as Head of Policy and Senior Researcher at the International Longevity Centre, Lecturer at the University of Warwick, and Policy Advisor on Older People and State Pensions at HM Treasury. He completed his PhD, on globalisation and UK trade policy-making, at the University of Sheffield in 2008.