These are all private plans. The reason there has been no action is that this is not a public crisis. This has been foreseeable (and foreseen) literally for decades. PBGC explicitly has no federal funding component.
This has always seemed to me to be a gamble agreed to by both the providers and recipients of private pensions over the years; they could have chosen to make them securely funded, but that would have resulted in smaller pensions and lower immediate salaries. Instead, they chose to take more money immediately, with the promise/hope for higher pensions funded by future providers. The gamble was whether they could find future payers when the bills came due.
I suspect that the huge financial cost of the reaction to Covid is going to reduce the willingness and ability to provide a massive outlay to the subset of retirees with bankrupt private pensions.
I fear that we are going to start testing what level of destruction can be done to the world reserve currency.
These are all private plans. The reason there has been no action is that this is not a public crisis. This has been foreseeable (and foreseen) literally for decades. PBGC explicitly has no federal funding component.
This has always seemed to me to be a gamble agreed to by both the providers and recipients of private pensions over the years; they could have chosen to make them securely funded, but that would have resulted in smaller pensions and lower immediate salaries. Instead, they chose to take more money immediately, with the promise/hope for higher pensions funded by future providers. The gamble was whether they could find future payers when the bills came due.
I suspect that the huge financial cost of the reaction to Covid is going to reduce the willingness and ability to provide a massive outlay to the subset of retirees with bankrupt private pensions.
I fear that we are going to start testing what level of destruction can be done to the world reserve currency.