Joseph A. Dear, the chief investment officer of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, who restored the pension fund to health after the financial crisis, died on Wednesday in Sacramento. He was 62.
The cause was prostate cancer, the fund, which is known as Calpers, said in a statement.
Mr. Dear had taken a medical leave in January. Theodore Eliopoulos, the acting chief investment officer, will continue in that role until further notice from Calpers about a search for a replacement, the pension fund said.
In his five years overseeing the investments of Calpers, Mr. Dear embraced a risky investment philosophy that proved successful in restoring the pension fund’s assets to above their level before the crisis, when they fell by more than a fourth. With 1.7 million members and $283.9 billion in assets, Calpers is the biggest public pension fund in the United States.
Mr. Dear took charge of Calpers’s investments at a dark moment in its history. The pension fund’s assets had fallen to $183.3 billion by the end of 2008, from $253 billion a year earlier, a loss of nearly 28 percent. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said the fund was “unsustainable.â€
But Mr. Dear, after joining Calpers in March 2009, committed more money to illiquid investment strategies, including private equity and hedge funds, betting that these would help the pension fund achieve returns superior to those available in the public markets.
A longtime government employee who once ran the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Mr. Dear became a powerful figure in the world of Wall Street money management, negotiating lower fees from the private equity firms that wanted his business.
Mr. Dear also helped Calpers weather a pay-to-play scandal that emerged during his first year on the job. In the wake of the controversy, which involved fees paid to the middlemen that connect pension funds with money managers, Calpers adopted new policies to improve disclosure.
Mr. Dear had a passion for “making government work better through innovative public policy and sheer force of will,†Calpers said in a statement.
A graduate of Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., Mr. Dear was nominated by President Bill Clinton to lead OSHA in 1993. He returned to Olympia four years later to serve as chief of staff to Gov. Gary Locke.
In 2002, Mr. Dear became the head of Washington State’s public pension fund, pushing it to take more risk and invest more in private equity. That bet served the pension fund well in boom times, though its fortunes reversed in the financial crisis.
Mr. Dear was born on June 7, 1951, in Washington, D.C. He is survived by his wife, Anne Sheehan, and two children.
