{"id":193543,"date":"2008-12-08T19:26:00","date_gmt":"2008-12-09T00:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/12\/08\/yet-more-bad-ideas-from-the-pension-sector\/"},"modified":"2008-12-08T19:26:00","modified_gmt":"2008-12-09T00:26:00","slug":"yet-more-bad-ideas-from-the-pension-sector","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/12\/08\/yet-more-bad-ideas-from-the-pension-sector\/","title":{"rendered":"Yet More Bad Ideas from the Pension Sector"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, it appears that those companies that still have traditional pension plans want <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/apps\/news?pid=20601109&amp;sid=aBAw1CQXcZMg&amp;refer=home\">Congress to give them a waiver so that they do not have to make contributions during this downturn<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>They think that it will be too much of a burden, and it may force them to cancel these plans altogether.<\/p>\n<p>Hmmmm&#8230;.It seems that this problem started when they went with highly aggressive investment plans in order to minimize their contributions, and then they got caught in the dotcom bubble&#8230;..And after that, they wanted more liberal rules so it wouldn&#8217;t be a burden.<\/p>\n<p>Basically, they are saying that they don&#8217;t want to buy when the market is down&#8230;.which is half of the classic investment goal &#8220;buy low and sell high&#8221; as I understand it&#8230;.So they are asking for permission to piss their money down the drain with a poor investment policy.<\/p>\n<p>Note that GM, has largely moved out of equities, and so were largely insulated from the downturn&#8230;.I would also note that this strategy also reduces the costs of managing the funds.<\/p>\n<p>Is it just me, or has every &#8220;innovation&#8221; in pensions and pension funds over the last 30 years had the effect of actually decreasing return on investment.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s kind of like the rest of the financial sector:  You get sold a bill of goods by an investment bank, and they get lost of fees, and you get the hole in the doughnut.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, it appears that those companies that still have traditional pension plans want Congress to give them a waiver so that they do not have to make contributions during this downturn. They think that it will be too much of a burden, and it may force them to cancel these plans altogether. Hmmmm&#8230;.It seems that &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[998,1004,985],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress","category-finance","category-regulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193543"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193543\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}