The typical U.S. corporate pension plan saw its funding level drop to 84.2 percent in August.

Public plans, endowments and foundations weren’t happy campers, either, as they too were caught up in market volatility.

According to BNY Mellon Fiduciary Solutions, the funded status of the typical U.S. corporate pension plan fell 2.5 percentage points, thanks to asset values that fell faster than liabilities, benefiting from widening credit spreads.

In fact, funded status dipped as low as 81.2 percent on August 24, according to the firm, but it has since recovered some of its lost ground.

Liabilities, it said, fell by 0.9 percent during the month, with the Aa corporate discount rate rising by 9 basis points to 4.44 percent.

Because asset values were down, public plans, endowments, and foundations failed to meet their targets. Public defined benefit plans missed August return targets by 4.7 percent, because assets fell by 4.1 percent, according to the August BNY Mellon Institutional Scorecard.

Public plans are behind on their year-to-date targets by 6.6 percent and are still below their targets for annual returns.

The scorecard also noted that for endowments and foundations, real return was down 4.4 percent.

The typical endowment and foundation saw asset returns drop 4.3 percent over the past year, according to the report; that’s behind the spending-plus-inflation target by 9.8 percent.

“The second half of August served as a wakeup call to investors who had been lulled to sleep by several months of low volatility in the markets,” said Andrew D. Wozniak, head of BNY Mellon Fiduciary Solutions, in a statement. “Corporate defined benefit plan sponsors were somewhat insulated from the full brunt of the volatility due to rising credit spreads, which led to a decline in liabilities.”

Wozniak added, “The decline in asset values that hit typical public defined benefit plans, endowments and foundations was primarily due to poor equity performance across the globe. Weakness in China is likely to emerge as the culprit behind the declines.”