Don't worry about it. The taxpayers will pay for it all. Nobody else is doing anything either.
Within the S&P 500, 295 companies offer [pension benefits] with the aggregate under funding for 2005 being $320.9 billion, which is 129% greater than that of the 2005 S&P 500 pension under funding. * * * Combined, pension and OPEB assets set aside for issues in the S&P 500 amounted to $1,409.2 billion in 2005 to cover $1,870.5 billion in obligations, with the resulting under funding of $461.4 billion being a record deficit. "The light at the end of the OPEB tunnel is clearly another train * * *"
Lets see: That is a record deficit of only $ 462.4 billion for last year alone. Nobody is going to do anything about the problem this year. Again. So add another $ 500 billion. Congress is lazy. So they will not do anything about it next year. In the meantime, baby boomers are retiring. Which means each year the problem will get worse, not better. Any suggestions?
Trillons of Dollars Lost in Federal Pension Meltdown
... liquidity surged in the past decade... ... in turn drove down interest rates... ...shift towards tighter money over the next decade or two.
They're saying that over the past 10 years we had low interest rates but there's something very different now that means "a change in the global monetary backdrop that usually inflicts pain on those asset classes highly dependent on easy money."
This is supposed to be hardest on the US because "all of America is now highly dependent on easy money." Leave it to the doomer-freepers to join a bunch of Europeans in their latest America bashing fest.
Interest rates are not soaring now. It's an up tick. If this is bad now, then someone is going to have to explain why it's worse than all the temporary up ticks we've been having every few years since the malaise daze.
We're hearing that America's private debt is way out of control. True, in the past four years it did increase by more than $3trillion. Time to get a grip. Our private holdings increased by $14trillion over this same period. $14 trillion is a lot more than $3 trillion. See for yourself. We're better off now.
My take is that if this is the best that America-bashers can come up with then we must be doing pretty darn good.
