Breaking News: CBRE Global Investors Names Dominic Garcia Chief Pension Investment Strategist

Former New Mexico PERA CIO takes on newly created role at real asset investment manager.

Dominic Garcia

CBRE Global Investors has tapped Dominic Garcia to the newly created position of chief pension investment strategist. Garcia joins the real asset investment manager from the Public Employees Retirement Association of New Mexico (PERA), where he worked for eight yearsthe last four as its chief investment officer.

At PERA, Garcia worked with stakeholders on enhancing the sustainability of the plan. He also established a risk budget, delegated investment authority to staff members, and created a risk-based approach to portfolio management.

Before joining the New Mexico PERA, Garcia was a senior funds alpha manager at the $144 billion State of Wisconsin Investment Board (SWIB), where he managed and oversaw the public market external active risk profile for global equities, global fixed income, multi-asset, and hedge funds, and was on the investment committee. At SWIB, Garcia worked under his mentor, CIO David Villa, who died in February.

Garcia’s new role will focus on developing solutions for pension funds that want to expand their infrastructure investments. A flood of money is expected to come into infrastructure projects over the coming years as President Joe Biden tries to pass an infrastructure plan that will invest an estimated $2 trillion this decade.

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“Pension funds are increasingly interested in infrastructure due to the predictability of cashflows and non-cyclical characteristics of the assets,” Stephen Dowd, CIO of private infrastructure strategies for CBRE Global Investors, said in a statement. “This new role underscores the strategic importance of infrastructure to our investors’ portfolios and our platform. We are excited to leverage Dominic’s investment expertise to help deliver these solutions to our investors.”

Garcia was named to CIO magazine’s 2021 Power 100 list earlier this year. He and his executive team were recognized for collaborating with stakeholders to improve long-term pension sustainability by modernizing investment governance and enacting pension reform. Garcia also integrated a risk-based approach that separates alpha and beta in the multi-asset investment portfolio.

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Will a Trimmed-Down Biden Program Zap Stocks?

Investors have been expecting further stimulus to keep juicing the markets, economist Lavorgna warns.


Big spending has been a big boon for the stock market. But what if the federal outlays won’t be so big? That wouldn’t be good news for equities or gross domestic product (GDP), according to Joseph Lavorgna, Natixis’ chief economist for the Americas.

The Biden White House is calling for roughly $4 trillion in extra federal spending, for infrastructure and for social needs such as early childhood education. That’s atop the $5 trillion spent since the March 2020 pandemic onset. But in a Congress only narrowly controlled by President Joe Biden’s party, a GOP pushback against the proposed price tag makes the president’s ambitions less likely to win out, at least in their current form.

“A big drop in the fiscal impulse, as it is known among economists, does not bode well for GDP growth,” Lavorgna wrote in a report. That $4 trillion Biden wish list could end up getting cut to a quarter of its original value, he ventured.

One Biden strategy was to push through the new spending initiatives via what’s called “budget reconciliation,” where a simple majority can prevail—a maneuver that is not subject to a Senate filibuster, which would require 60 votes to break.

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So with just an eight-vote Democratic margin in the House and an evenly divided Senate, where Vice President Kamala Harris could break the tie in favor of the Dems, Biden could prevail with zero Republican votes. But he would need all the Senate Democrats since the congressional GOP has held together on this issue. The continuation of monster Washington spending boosts also has touched off a debate about its possible impact on inflation.

But that plan suffered a blow last week, when Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled that reconciliation can only be used once a year. Democrats had hoped to separate the infra and social spending proposals into separate bills that could be moved through the reconciliation process. The relatively smaller items might be more palatable for lawmakers, the reasoning went. Now, only one giant measure would be permitted.

MacDonough wrote that, back in 1974 when Congress created the reconciliation concept, it was to be employed only “in extraordinary circumstances and not for things that should have been or could have been foreseen and handled” in a regular budget resolution.

Because of the $4 trillion “sticker shock,” in Lavorgna’s words, such a package “is not a done deal.” Upshot, the economist went on, the overall price could be trimmed to as low as $1 trillion.

Of course, a slimmer Biden plan would mean less Treasury bond issuance, which in turn would hold down interest rates—something that is good for stocks. Also, Lavorgna argued, because the Federal Reserve “thinks government spending would be a boost to growth, a much smaller bill would likely keep the Fed on the sidelines longer,” with no interest rate hikes.

That said, the market was expecting a humongous new round of federal spending, Lavorgna pointed out. “Equity markets have zoomed higher on the prospect of more government stimulus,” he explained. For one thing, a chunk of the past stimulus likely has gone into the market.

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