West News Wire: As a result of holding more than $27 million in Silicon Valley Bank shares before to the bank’s failure, a public pension fund for teachers in Ohio revealed it suffered a massive loss.
The State Teachers Retirement System (STRS) of Ohio said that the shares made up just.03% of its entire holdings, which at the end of June 2022 totaled more than $88.8 billion in assets. The declaration affirmed that the bank did not own any stock in the recently failed Signature or Silvergate banks.
Almost 500,000 current and past public educators in Ohio are covered by the STRS pension plan.
The Treasury Department, Federal Reserve, and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation worked together to cover and backup deposits, which helped to alleviate the situation facing the banking industry,” STRS wrote in their statement. “STRS Ohio continues to monitor and assess the impact of these developments.”
The multi-million dollar loss comes as another repercussion of the ongoing financial crisis. Silicon Valley Bank, the 16th largest bank in the U.S., collapsed one week ago, followed by the collapse of Signature Bank. Silvergate Bank, which specialized in providing services to cryptocurrency users, also liquidated its assets earlier in March.
The financial crisis has impacted other pension funds, including North Carolina’s state pension fund and California’s public employee retirement fund.
The California Public Employees’ Retirement System, which covers 1.5 million people, also revealed it had roughly $67 million in exposure to Silicon Valley Bank and $11 million in exposure to Signature Bank at a board meeting this week. The nation’s largest public pension fund with over $422 billion, CalPERS suffered a relatively small impact from the financial crisis.
The losses in California, Ohio and North Carolina represent a fraction of the losses suffered by a Swedish pension fund representing over 2.6 million people that invested over $1.1 billion in Signature and Silicon Valley Bank. Magnus Billing, the CEO of Alecta, told Bloomberg that the investments were a “big failure” and that the fund would likely write off their holdings as a loss.
