Olivia Mitchell to Receive CIO’s 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award

The Wharton professor’s research and efforts have changed public policy on pensions and brought attention to the importance of financial literacy.

Olivia Mitchell

As part of the 2024 Industry Innovation Awards, CIO will celebrate Olivia Mitchell, professor of business economics and public policy, as well as insurance and risk management, at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, with a Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of her contributions to the industry.

Mitchell, whose titles also include International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans professor, has spent more than 31 years at Penn and also serves as executive director of the Pension Research Council and as director of the Boettner Center on Pensions and Retirement Research there. In 2023, she was elected a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association.

The award will be presented on December 10 at CIO’s Industry Innovation Awards Dinner in New York City.

The child of economists who attended high school in Lima, Peru, and Santiago, Chile, her college studies focused on development economics. However, in an early job, teaching at Cornell University, she was asked to teach a course on pensions and health insurers. Some time later, she was hired at Wharton to continue her focus on pensions and retirement security. She has stayed on that path.

She has also developed a focus on financial literacy, the subject of many of her recent articles, and she launched an undergraduate course at Penn called “Consumer Financial Decision Making” to help students learn to navigate the financial issues of adulthood.

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Her research and experience make her a resource for policymakers seeking insights, ideas or recommendations.

Her contribution to the national dialogue about retirement included her role as a member of President George W. Bush’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security more than 20 years ago. That bipartisan group advocated ways to reduce the growth rate of benefits, without cutting benefits. It also recommended allowing Social Security participants to set aside some part of the Social Security tax contribution into a personal account, an idea that seemingly would have some support today, and one she says would have been “a wash” for the system’s solvency.

In her own words, “due to political opposition and also the fact that that year had 9/11, the plan was dead in the water.”

More than 20 years later, Social Security is estimated to have to start reducing benefits payments in 2034, and Mitchell predicts a political compromise on reforming the system will not come until the country is “within a couple of months of cutting benefits.”

Regarding pensions and longevity globally, Mitchell says the “workplace, workforce and employers are different today,” and new models are developing globally.

However, she acknowledges that in an aging world, people likely are going to have to “work longer, save more and expect less.”

CIO has presented the Lifetime Achievement Award since 2011 to individuals, including asset allocators, asset managers and now an academic, whose work in the pension and institutional investing business has protected and benefitted the investment resources of pension funds, endowments and foundations around the world.

Past honorees received the recognition for different efforts and varied careers, but the one thing they share are the contributions each has made to the community of investors and to institutional asset ownership. As we will tonight, this award has always recognized people who helped train the up-and-coming talent in the industry, who have given time and attention to solving complex problems independently, providing service to the industry, and advancing important ideas.

Previous winners have included (among others) Christopher Ailman, then CIO of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System; Walter Kress, CIO of EY; Robin Diamonte, then CIO of UTC, Thomas “Britt” Harris, then the CIO of the Teacher Retirement System of Texas; Mark Schmid, then the CIO of the University of Chicago; Ash Williams, the then-CIO and executive director of the Florida State Board of Administration; and Mansco Perry, the then CIO of the Minnesota State Board of Investment.

We have honored people for their innovations—in investing and in operations—their determination and their contributions to the community of the world’s investors and those concerned about retirement policy.

When reviewing the names that came up in our conversations this year, Mitchell was the choice.

After more than 45 years of research and teaching about pensions, investor behavior and financial literacy, and amid her ongoing work as an educator and policy adviser, she makes time to highlight the work of others in the field and to work with global groups to promote healthy aging and continue studying the work of pension and benefits world.

Tags: Industry Innovation Awards, Lifetime Achievement Award, Olivia Mitchell, Wharton Pension Research Council, Wharton School

Significant changes from President-elect Trump’s fiscal policies are likely to have an impact into the second half of 2025 and beyond, bond market sources say.

Bond markets have been volatile this year, and investors are watching the yield on 10-year Treasurys especially closely. In 2023, yields spiked to 5%, and they have tended to hover in a range from 4% through 4.4% this year, which at times has meant the yield on 10-year Treasurys has been higher than the yield on the S&P 500.

Bond traders and market analysts suggest the volatility is far from over. Markets are still pricing in one more Federal Reserve interest rate cut before year-end, but with the change in presidential administration on the horizon, it is hard to say what is on deck for 2025. Many of President-elect Donald Trump’s policies could have an inflationary impact, which could mean the Fed opts to leave rates where they are in order to maintain inflation in the target range of 2% to 4%.

“Right after the election, we saw an 18-basis-point pop in the 10-year, which was significant,” says Karin Anderson, director of credit manager research at WTW. “I don’t think we’re going to keep seeing big spikes like that, but everyone is focused on inflation right now. There are a lot of question marks about policies, and I do think we’re going to see higher volatility at the long end of the curve through the end of the year and into 2025.”

For institutional investors, the end of the year might be a good time to assess current exposure. Assets are flowing into fixed income, broadly—and Treasurys, specifically—at a pretty solid pace, Anderson says, adding that ongoing volatility may offer investors some tactical opportunities. If equities continue to rise, sources say, investors may opt to take profits and move more money into bonds to take advantage of higher yields.

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Fiscal Fog

Yields could stay higher through the end of the year as markets react to appointments by Trump’s administration, as well as other macroeconomic data.

“The fact that we’re potentially looking at a unified government, I think, is pushing the curve higher,” says Simon Dangoor, head of fixed-income strategies for Goldman Sachs Asset Management. “Some of the policies could, if enacted, lead to higher bond issuance, which I think is driving some of it. We’re also seeing generally higher demand for the long end of the bond market as flows come from the equities market into fixed income—particularly in the pension funds sector, where we are seeing some rebalancing take place. Those trends are likely to continue as the market continues to parse out where we are.”

Joanne Bianco, a partner in and investment strategist at BondBloxx, agrees and anticipates that there could be opportunities along the curve, depending on how comfortable investors feel adding longer-duration bonds.

“We’ve seen a lot of activity at the short end over the past few years because yields have been highest there,” Bianco says. “But we’re talking to people about looking at longer-dated bonds in this environment. If you’re not ready to go to 10, there are still opportunities looking two years out, for example. It can help with diversification as well.”

Bond Vigilantes Issue a Warning

Analysts anticipate that the yield on the 10-year is likely to stay within the 4% to 4.4% range in which it has been trading all year. Any big moves are likely to be on the heels of significant changes in fiscal policy. While some of that can happen quickly, most of it is likely to be a story for the second half of 2025 and beyond.

“It’s still a bit early to tell what is real and what isn’t,” Dangoor says. “If some of the tariff proposals turn out to just be a negotiating tactic, then we aren’t likely to see some of the most extreme negative impacts people are talking about, for example. The bigger picture is that the Fed is pretty fairly priced here—at least right now. So there’s an opportunity for investors to rebalance, and they could do that across the term structure.”

Jack McIntyre, a portfolio manager at Brandywine Global Investment Management, says he is talking to clients more about term premia, which could be supportive to portfolios over the next few quarters.

“We haven’t been talking about term premia for a while because it wasn’t really a feature of the bond market for several years,” McIntyre says. “But it’s back now, and if investors are taking on duration, they should look closely at their exposures to make sure that they are going to get paid for the risk.”

Looking ahead, McIntyre says bond market participants are going to be watching fiscal and monetary policy closely and could act to slow down any moves by an incoming Trump administration if they damage the U.S. economy.

“Is it going to be a 2017 2.0, where he ran through a lot of stuff? Or is Congress going to be more thoughtful this time around? I think a lot of people will be watching closely,” McIntyre says. “Bond markets have very recently lived through an inflationary cycle, so the world is different from what it was in 2016-17. If they aren’t focused on debt and deficits, [and] if they do a bunch of spending, you could see some pushback. Trump gets it—all politicians are beholden to the bond market.”

Tags: BondBloxx, Bonds, Brandywine Global Investment Management, fixed-income securities, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Jack McIntyre, Joanne Bianco, Karin Anderson, Simon Dangoor, WTW