The World's Growing Pension Pains

[Valin]

Viable Opposition: 6/14/12

 

A few days ago, I posted an article on the dire situation currently being experienced by General Motors and their massively under-funded pension plan. Recently, data from the United Kingdom shows just how critical the world's pension Ponzi situation really is since all nations with a large contingent of baby boomers share the same pension fate.

 

The United Kingdom's Pension Protection Fund exists to provide compensation to members of defined benefit pension plans when there is an event resulting in employer insolvency or when there are insufficient assets in the pension plan to cover its obligations either through under-funding or through fraud. The Pension Protection Fund is funded by annual levies charged on all pension plans; this levy totaled £697 million in the last fiscal year. Assets of the Fund are managed by a "who's who" of the financial world, including Goldman Sachs (who else?) and PIMCO. The Fund holds a wide range of global bonds and equities, real estate, infrastructure, private equity and derivatives. As it stands now, the Fund has total current and non-current assets of £7.115 billion and expects to have an investment portfolio of £17 billion by 2015.

 

It its latest update, the Pension Protection Fund included this graph:

 

(Snip)