The US public pensions crisis ‘is really hard to fix'

According to Wilshire Consulting, an investment advisory company, state-sponsored pension plans in the US had just 73 per cent of the assets they needed in mid-2015, down from 77 per cent in 2014. Turbulent market conditions in the latter part of 2015 and early 2016 probably made this number even worse.

The scale of this pension crisis, as it has been dubbed, is huge. The Hoover Institution, a think-tank at Stanford University, estimates that US public pensions collectively have a $3.4tn funding hole. More conservative numbers put the funding gap at around $1tn.

... fixing the schemes will require a lot of work and is likely to have unpleasant consequences for retirees, employees, taxpayers and politicians... But higher taxes or the issuance of bonds, another option used by local governments to raise money in order to reduce pension deficits, often proves unpopular with taxpayers.

... Unions, public sector employees and retirees do not want to give up the benefits promised to them, politicians do not want to impose tax hikes that could cost them votes, and taxpayers are reluctant to part with more cash to prop up the system.

... Public plans typically have high return targets of between 7 and 8 per cent, which are used to forecast how much money a pension fund will need to pay current and future retirees. Private sector pension plans, in contrast, typically use lower rates of 2.5 per cent on average to calculate future liabilities, says Ms Mitchell... An ageing public sector population is not helping matters. "There is no young blood coming in to keep their plans going," says Ms Mitchell.