Rock Steady: Moving toward a Steady-State Economy
by Susan Arterian Chang
The global steady-state movement unites everyone from permaculturalists and locavores to sustainable bankers and environmental risk managers against the contradictions of growth economics’ obsession with maximizing GDP. A steady-state landscape doesn’t pertain just to environmental impacts—it’s altering the relationship between savings and loans, reaching out to impact intellectual property law, and could even change the traditional workday. This intriguing investigative report introduces readers to powerful grassroots mobilizations like Transition Culture and sophisticated engines for emissions data analysis, like Trucost’s TRUEVA. Discover which nations have actively implemented policies to internalize their industries’ production costs, and find out where the investment opportunities lie.

Rise and Shine: ARRA Stimulates the Municipal Funding Market
by Howard Spieler
One of the government’s most serious attempts at defibrillating the US economy, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 contains multiple provisions intended to seduce investors into purchasing municipal bonds that will be used to fund the expensive fiscal policies meant to lift us out of the recession. The Act not only relaxes the AMT for certain muni investors, but it creates new munis with decisive benefits for investors in various tax brackets, like the Build America Bond, with its tax-exempt interest and tax credit. Data from the Fed strongly suggests that the muni market is entering a long-term upswing, but questions about the effect of falling property values on local governments’ property tax revenues, and about the serious hits taken by bond insurance and the auction-rate market, are a dark lining to the silver cloud.

The Prudent Man Standard: Legal and Investing Implications of LDI Safeguards for Pension Risk
by Martin J. Rosenburgh and Andrew C. Spieler
The authors of this article—essential reading for anyone responsible for (or dependent on) a corporate defined benefit pension plan—bring both legal and investing expertise to bear on their discussion of liability-driven investment strategies for managing pension risk. LDI strategies use a hedging approach to minimize the risk of DB pension plans, benchmarking plans not to return of assets, but to a plan’s liabilities. LDI not only protects plans from volatility in their funding status, it also protects plan fiduciaries, as the evolving legal landscape makes it increasingly likely that members of a company’s investment committee, for example, may be held liable for failing to give LDI strategies a fair hearing, or even for rejecting LDI strategies for their impact on, say, company reported earnings, rather than the health of the plan.