The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 32 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Mizuno: Large Asset Owners Cannot Protect Portfolios Within Unsustainable Global Markets
“If I look at the long-term performance of all the big asset owners, I mean, big or small, their performance pretty much dictated by what happened to the global economy. Or the global stock market. I concluded that we probably think the way to change that or ma…”
Mizuno: Pension CIO decisions make marginal difference compared to board asset mix
“Well, the point is, most of the big asset owners, let's take public pension fund as an example, GPF, Culpers, Coasters, and all the big public pension funds, their most critical decision In terms of the financial performance of their portfolio performance is n…”
Mizuno: Passive Investing Becomes Inefficient Without Active Investors Setting Prices
“Passive investment is effective or efficient because it take all the active managers or the active investors opinion into their pricing. So the basically they are free riding all the other active investors. I'm not only talking about active portfolio manager, …”
Mizuno: GPIF brand-name active managers delivered zero net alpha over 20 years
“GPF's brand name active managers portfolio delivered zero ultra net of fee. Over almost 20 years of GPF history.”
Mizuno: Mega Asset Owners Cannot Beat the Market Universe, Only Improve It
“So we basically just said we are owner of the unique capital market universe. So we are universal owner. So our job is not to be the universe because we cannot. So let's see. What we can do to make that universe better.”
Mizuno: Portfolio Sustainability Depends Sequentially on Market, Society, and Environment
“We just basically came up with the concept of, for our portfolio to become sustainable, We need to make sure the capital market to be sustainable, and for the capital market to be sustainable, we need to make sure society must be sustainable, and for the socie…”
Mizuno: Passive managers only add value through stewardship, not index tracking
“And the index tracking, that's what people say that they add value, but I really believe that should be cost-free because we don't need a human to track the index anymore. Only the area I thought the passive manager can really add value and differentiate their…”
Mizuno: GPIF Mandated ESG Integration and Externality Control for Active Managers
“Last year, GPF made a very clear, explicit statement to our active managers that GPF expects all our active managers to integrate ESG into their investment analysis and decision making, and also, we Choose the active managers who control the negative externali…”
Mizuno: Active Outperformance With Negative Externalities Harms Universal Owners
“Even if the other one of our active managers build the portfolio, which perform the better short term, but those companies in their portfolio is actually producing a lot of negative externality, which damage the long-term sustainability of the environmental so…”
Mizuno: Many managers perform ESG analysis without using it in decisions
“A lot of asset managers keep telling us, we do this much analysis on ESG, and we do this much analysis on this, and we hire this, we buy this information set, and I said, and in the end I said, how do you use it for investment decision making? And then a lot o…”
Mizuno: Active manager ESG teams meet CEOs without knowing if they hold shares
“There's a lot of time we observe their stewardship team or like engagement manager go to meet their CEO without even knowing whether their fund actually owns that company because the fund manager trade in their own discretion.”
Mizuno: Divesting carbon-heavy industries does not reduce global carbon emissions
“We are passing ownership of those problematic business to the people who don't care about it. We don't want it to reduce the carbon footprint by divesting carbon heavy industry because it doesn't reduce the carbon footprint of the world anyway.”
Mizuno: Central bank stimulus eases present pain by borrowing from future generations
“We are basically doing it by borrowing from future generations. And that's what we did during the Lehman crisis. We really struggled to bring it back to normal, and then we got the, another pandemic hitting the market, and we are repeating it again. So I'm jus…”
Mizuno: GPIF refocused on systemic market sustainability over manager selection
“What I decided to do is I tried to change people's mindset. We had been spending a lot of time and energy on something which actually makes marginal difference. Why don't we try to spend time to make the real difference, which is trying to contribute and do th…”
Mizuno: Japanese public has strong resistance to investing in equities
“Japanese general public's financial literacy is not as high as I hoped, and there's a very strong sort of, like, a resistance or, like, hesitation among Japanese people to invest in stock because they think it's risky.”
Mizuno: Public pension CIOs struggle with financially illiterate stakeholders
“A lot of public pension fund, the CIO I talk to in private conversation, they always complain that they are finding very difficult because on one hand, they have to act as a financial professional, but on the other hand,
A lot of times they have to deal with t…”
Mizuno: Personally Supports Home Country Bias for Public Pension Funds
“And I'm actually personally a supporter of the Home country bias, given those, like, different factors to consider.”
Mizuno: GPIF moved active managers to performance fees with passive-rate base fees
“GPF basically proposed that all the acting managers change their fee structure to almost fully a performance-based fee. With the low base fee, which is the, as much as we would pay to the passive managers”
Mizuno: Asset owners cannot effectively monitor managers due to information asymmetry
“The information asymmetry, as well as the experience asymmetry, our expertise asymmetry, we really cannot make the effective monitoring of asset managers, because they are much more sophisticated, much more informed.”
Mizuno: Only two passive managers earned extra fees for stewardship at GPIF
“And by the time I left, there are only two passive managers who proposed their GPIF, their new business model with specific KPI, how to improve their stewardship activities, and they received extra layout fees from the GPIF.”
Mizuno: Fixed income offers more consistent alpha than equity markets
“Fixed income is a very interesting one because it's easier to beat the benchmark. The fixed income compared to the stock market, there's much more consistent Alpha generation.”
Mizuno: GPIF portfolio analysis revealed a 3-degree global warming trajectory
“Unfortunately, last year, we used the T-Safety framework and came up with a conclusion that our portfolio on the path of the three degree instead of two. And that means the world is on that trajectory.”
Mizuno: GPIF shifted asset allocation from mostly bonds to 50% equities
“I was a member of the trustee board at that time when the other, you know, GPI made a decision to change the asset allocation from the mostly Japanese government bond to half equity portfolio.”
Mizuno: GPIF shifted to multi-year contracts, ending quarterly performance reviews
“As a part of this new fee proposal, we also told the managers that from then on, we only retain the asset managers Who we are convinced to give them like a five-year or like a multi-year contract. We are not going to put the managers in a situation like their …”
Mizuno: Performance fee structure improved net alpha odds by roughly 30%
“We simulated, and I think the introducing that the fee structure only improved the chance of creating net of fee offer by almost like a 30%.”
Mizuno: GPIF weighted stewardship at 30% in passive manager evaluations
“So we changed our evaluation scoring model. To allocate 30% of the total score to the stewardship activities in the evaluation of passive managers.”
Mizuno: Asset management is overly afraid to act without standardized metrics
“I always find that this industry, we are very afraid of doing something new without having a clear concept of a measurement and a standardized data set. But I always think that in real world, you need to start it. But when we started, we need to make sure that…”
Mizuno: Passive managers' influence over corporate executives has drastically increased
“The passive manager used to be very easy ones, because they actually either just follow the ISS and address this type of the proxy voting advisors, advisors, advisors, but now they actually have their own, they seem to have their own opinion. And they actually…”
Mizuno: Asset owners focus on entitlements but ignore owner responsibilities
“Because the asset owner, we always talk about our entitlement as the owner. But on the other hand, we usually very, very lack time to talk about our responsibility as the owner.”
Mizuno: CFA and MBA curriculums lack even one chapter on ESG
“Given now the ESG is one of the hottest topic in the industry, but there's not even a chapter in a CFA curriculum or MBA curriculum.”