March 15, 2010 — Reuters reports on NIRS’ analysis of newly-released Federal Reserve Flow of Funds data indicating that public pensions held steady, benefiting from 2009 stock market recovery.

Reuters reports that as a group, public sector pension funds gained 16 percent last year, versus a gain of 13 percent for corporate pension plans.  The public sector plans did better because they made fewer changes during the financial crisis and kept more of their assets in equities, NIRS found.

“When you look at the bulk of assets in the public plans, they’re in plain-vanilla kinds of things like equities, bonds and Treasuries,” NIRS executive director Beth Almeida told Reuters.

Read the full article here.