LANSING ? Michigan public employee retirement systems may soon be able to more greatly diversify their retirement portfolio and expand their funds globally if a bill reported Wednesday from the Senate Appropriations Committee becomes law.
“At the end of the day, the world has changed,” said Sen. Mark Jansen (R-Gaines Township), sponsor of the bill. “We’re a global economy. I don’t think you can get around it anymore.”
Sen. Darwin Booher (R-Evart) expressed some concern regarding the spread of retirement dollars beyond the state of Michigan or even the United States, but it heard little support on a bill (SB 797 ) that otherwise cleared the panel 12-1, with several committee members absent from the meeting.
“I don’t believe the world economy is set up to do better than Michigan or the United States,” Booher said, referring to the level of risk the measure would create. Sen. Bruce Caswell (R-Hillsdale) said he could understand his colleague’s view, but still disagreed with the argument.
“We’ve certainly had a lot of risk in this country,” he said. “If you’re going to invest, it seems to me it makes sense to invest where there’s capital to grow an economy. There is no capital in Europe to speak of, outside of Germany. We have tremendous debt problems in this country and if we want to be honest, the capital of this world is in India and China.”
Booher said that, while that may be so, he was tired of hearing media reports that said state legislators were giving money and jobs away to other countries, and he felt this bill, in concept, would be no different.
The committee reported the bill with an amendment by Caswell that prohibits the systems from making contributions to any legal defense funds, which was adopted unanimously.
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