CalPERS Brand Guidelines: Sacramento’s 1932 State Pension System, Renamed in 1992

A state retirement system in Sacramento.

CalPERS — the California Public Employees’ Retirement System — is an agency of California’s executive branch, based at Lincoln Plaza in Sacramento. English Wikipedia traces it to a vote in 1930, when Californians approved an amendment to the state constitution allowing pensions for state workers. A state law establishing a retirement plan followed in 1931, and in 1932 the State Employees’ Retirement System, or SERS, began operating.

It widened step by step. A 1939 law let local public agencies — cities, counties and school districts — join. SERS could at first invest only in bonds; a 1953 law allowed real estate, and the system built a 16-storey office building in Sacramento that opened in 1965, partly leased to other state agencies. Health insurance, which Wikipedia calls the first major new benefit for members, began in 1962 under a law later amended into the Public Employees’ Medical and Hospital Care Act. By 1967, with hundreds of local agencies under contract, the system was renamed the Public Employees’ Retirement System, PERS. A ballot measure and a state law in 1966 and 1967 let it put up to a quarter of its portfolio in stocks, and Proposition 21 removed that limit in 1984.

The name CalPERS dates from 1992, English Wikipedia says, adopted to avoid confusion with public employees’ retirement systems in other states. The same year, voters passed Proposition 162, the California Pension Protection Act of 1992, which gave the system’s board “the sole and exclusive fiduciary responsibility” over its assets.

A board, a Focus List and a “CalPERS effect.”

CalPERS is run by a 13-member Board of Administration. Six members are elected by members of the system, three are appointed — two by the governor and one by leaders of the Legislature — and four sit ex officio: the State Treasurer, the State Controller, the director of the state’s human-resources department and a designee of the State Personnel Board, English Wikipedia says. CalPERS says the board’s composition is mandated by law and can be changed only by a majority of the state’s registered voters.

Its reputation outside California rests largely on shareholder activism. In the mid-1980s, Wikipedia records, a board member then serving as State Treasurer began the system’s emphasis on corporate governance and helped create the Council of Institutional Investors. From 1987 CalPERS placed companies it was concerned about on a Focus List, sometimes called a “name and shame” list. A 1994 study by Nesbitt found that listed companies had trailed the S&P 500 before being named and outperformed it afterwards, and called this the “CalPERS effect”; later studies reached mixed conclusions, Wikipedia notes, with one in 2006 finding no evidence that the effect persisted after 1993 and another finding small but positive market reactions. In 2010 CalPERS stopped naming Focus List companies publicly and began dealing with them privately.

Its engagement has also been specific. At Apple, after more than two years of talks and CalPERS-sponsored resolutions, majority voting for directors was adopted in 2014, Wikipedia says. In 2003 it joined other pension funds in calling for the New York Stock Exchange’s chairman to resign over his pay; he resigned the next day. And under a state law effective 1 June 2017, CalPERS may not hold companies that earn at least half of their revenue from thermal coal.

Design and documentation.

Sovereign wealth funds and large public pension investors rarely advertise. They manage money for governments or for pension members rather than for retail customers, and their public identity is built mostly from documents: annual reports, responsible-investment reports, governance pages and press releases about individual deals. Norway’s oil fund publishes a year-by-year timeline of its own growth; Singapore’s GIC publishes a report each July with its 20-year returns, while explaining on its website why it does not disclose the size of its assets.

Their websites tend to be restrained. They lead with a mandate — preserving national wealth, paying pensions, investing for future generations — and support it with portfolio overviews, lists of holdings, leadership pages and statements of values. Several also publish stewardship material: how they vote at company meetings, how they engage with boards, and which companies they have excluded or placed under observation, and why. NBIM’s exclusion list, which gives a criterion and a date for each company, is one example.

Their physical presence is usually a handful of offices in financial districts rather than shops or products. NBIM lists offices in Oslo, London, New York and Singapore; English Wikipedia describes GIC’s network of 11 offices in financial capitals. What the public sees of them is mostly a name or a set of initials, a limited palette, and pages of text and charts.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each institution — when it was founded, who owns it, what it is mandated to do and how it presents itself — using dated sources and the institutions’ own words, attributed as such. Occasionally one steps outside that register, as GIC did in October 2026 with The Secret Vault, a public exhibition marking its 45th anniversary.

“We serve those who serve California.”

The system’s most visible design statement is its headquarters. In 1986 it completed the building now called Lincoln Plaza North in Sacramento, known, English Wikipedia says, for a six-storey atrium and landscaped terraces. In November 2005 it added Lincoln Plaza East and West, designed by the architecture studio Pickard Chilton, with an entry tower about 90 feet high in a shape reminiscent of a tree, made of steel covered with glass; the project received a Gold rating under the LEED green-building system, Wikipedia says. On its own website CalPERS calls itself “the nation’s largest public pension fund” and signs off with the line “We serve those who serve California.”

Its governance has faced serious tests. In 2014, a former CalPERS chief executive, who had led the fund from 2002 to 2008, admitted taking bribes in a pay-to-play scheme involving a placement agent who had been a board member, and in May 2016 a federal court sentenced him to four and a half years in prison, Chief Investment Officer reported in June 2016. CalPERS said it had, since 2009, required external managers to disclose the terms of placement-agent arrangements, required such agents to register as lobbyists and limited gifts to board members and staff. Earlier, in 2001, a board member serving as State Controller sued the system to limit pay for its investment managers, and CalPERS lost the case, Wikipedia records.

For a design guide, CalPERS shows how a coined acronym can become an institution’s whole identity, carried by a building, a slogan and a governance record. Compare CPP Investments, the investor created by statute for the Canada Pension Plan, and Ontario Teachers’, another large public-sector pension investor. For this guide we use a Capitol blue and a poppy gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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