‘Hedge funds’ dumping stock latest

As always, prices move, and then comes the news:

The nation’s largest public pension fund, known as Calpers, is unloading stocks in a falling market to make sure it has enough cash to meet its obligations.

The pressures come as the California Public Employees’ Retirement System has had to raise cash to fulfill commitments to private-equity firms and real-estate partners. The giant fund’s predicament is another sign of how the market selloff is tightening the screws on pension funds nationwide...

...Calpers said it had $188.8 billion under management as of Wednesday [Oct. 22], down 21% from the end of June.

Or, as one especially astute (not to mention modest) market observer said on NPR on Saturday, Oct. 18:

The attempt to pin market chaos on hedge funds is, in my view, giving them rather more credit than they deserve. There are a lot of moving parts and hedge funds are just one of the moving parts in what’s going on in the market at the moment.

More astute still? Let’s start with Calpers’ (former) chief executive officer Fred Buenrostro and (former) chief investment officer Russell Read, whose legacy contribution was to ramp up Calpers’ commodity — err, make that ‘inflation-linked’ — investments beginning in late 2006, hitting the eject button?

Calpers Sells Stock Amid Rout to Raise Cash for Obligations

by Craig Karmin And Joann S. Lublin

The Wall Street Journal Oct. 25 2008