California Public Employees’ Retirement System has hired Ben Meng as chief investment officer, marking his return to the largest U.S. pension fund after an investing role in China.
CalPERS said Monday that it has not yet set a start date for Meng, who has served as deputy CIO of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange in Beijing for the past three years. Meng is replacing Ted Eliopoulos, who is leaving Sacramento to relocate to New York.
Meng, a U.S. citizen born in China, will oversee the pension fund’s investment office of nearly 400 employees and manage its $360 billion portfolio. He first joined CalPERS in 2008, working for the pension for seven years before joining SAFE.
“During his time with CalPERS, Ben acquired a deep understanding of the asset and liability management process that has become so important to achieving our goals,” Marcie Frost, chief executive officer of CalPERS, said in the statement. “He knows the complexities of our system and can hit the ground running.”
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Meng also has experience on Wall Street.
Before joining CalPERS in 2008, he worked at Barclays as a senior portfolio manager, Lehman Brothers Holdings as a risk officer, and was a fixed-income trader at Morgan Stanley.
