Wenning Jung has joined Franklin Templeton Real Estate Advisors in California to lead the team’s Asia business. She joins from the California Public Employee’s Retirement System (Calpers), the largest public pension fund in the United States, where she had served as an investment officer in its real-estate department.

While at Calpers she had implemented a new investment strategy into Asia and managed a portfolio of seven international commingled and separate account funds. Hers is a new role at Franklin Templeton, designed to help the firm boost its investments into Asia-based real-estate managers. The firm manages $2.5 billion of real-estate investments as funds of funds. She could not say whether the firm is preparing to introduce new products or if it is enhancing the existing offering.

Many improvements have since been made. Countries have bolstered their regulatory transparency and supervisory oversight, corporate governance, risk management, and the quality of economic data. Central banks are now more independent, government debt has been reined in, and financial systems are stronger. Yet the growth-reducing effects of the crisis linger.

After seeing how the current-account deficits in trade and investment flow that they were running at the time left them vulnerable, a number of Asian countries refocused their internal investment policies on export capacity, maintaining low currency values and building current-account surpluses.