In his book, Proofiness, Charles Seife quotes a 2007 survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control that found an American male, on average, has sex with seven women in his lifetime while an American female has sex with four men in her lifetime. Seife claims this finding is ridiculous, given there are roughly the […]
Perhaps it’s premature to do a post-mortem on corporate DB plans, as there are still plans in existence. And, perhaps the DB plan will arise—like a phoenix—transformed into some more sustainable target benefit form. But it is useful to ask, ‘What went wrong?’ since the answer calls into question some fundamental assumptions that many plan […]
Politics plays an important role in pension reform, and always has ever since Otto Von Bismarck introduced the first old age pension in 1889. Apparently a major motivation for Bismarck’s conservative government to introduce this pension was to reduce the attractiveness of socialism. Maybe the current initiatives are Bismarck phase II. But it isn’t just […]
That esteemed financial guru, Yogi Berra, once said, “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.” I have it on good authority that Berra was referring specifically to pension fund investing when he made this comment, which would explain why so many defined […]
There’s a real disconnect between the expectations of pension fund investors and the returns they can reasonably hope to achieve. How can we bridge the performance/expectations gap? The gap between what a pension fund investor can reasonably expect to achieve and what the pension fund investor wants or needs to achieve has been widening over […]