Business
A Michigan Pension Fund’s Failed Coffee Farm Bet Highlights Private-Market Risks
A Michigan pension fund wanted to grow the second-largest coffee farm in Hawaii. What happened there demonstrates the perils of investing public workers’ savings in private markets.
The $16 billion Lansing-based retirement fund ended up abandoning the coffee farm last spring after nine years and $86 million in losses. A few months later, the pension said it had lost $53 million on another ambitious private market bet: an investment with a one-year-old Swiss firm in renewable energy technology.
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