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日本に外資金融会社が進出してきて１０年になろうとしており、日本人の年金運用にも高利回りを宣伝文句にかなりの市場占拠率を獲得しているようです。宣伝に乗せられて年金運用を日本の会社から外資に乗り換えて大損した話がインターネットであちこちに見られる様になりましたが、皆さん気をつけて読んでおいでですか。ウオール街の宣伝に騙されて虎の子の年金を磨ってしまうのは何も日本人だけではありません。下のニューヨーク・タイムズの抜粋記事でも解りますように、ユナイテッド・エアラインの年金運用にも大損を出しているくせに手数料だけはガッチリ取っています。その手数料も１４０億円と少々の額ではありません。
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/business/yourmoney/31pension.htm
チリーの国民年金が民営化されて２５年になりますが、年金の３割近くが手数料として金融業者に巻き上げられています。だから利回りはちっとも良くありません。チリーの国民年金については此処に要約されています。
http://www.harolddoan.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4227
年金だけは絶対に民営化してはなりません。企業年金で国が預かってくれない時は必ず日本の金融会社にやらせれば少なくとも損を出したときに彼らの責任を問えます。外資金融会社は知らん顔をして撤退するだけで責任を取るような事は絶対にやりません。決して欲を出して利回りの良い金融会社を選ばず、安全第一で損失を出したときに責任を取る金融会社を選ぶ事です。
July 31, 2005
How Wall Street Wrecked United's Pension
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
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United is far from unique. Lifting the lid on how most pension funds are invested might raise an outcry if the 44 million Americans covered by company plans knew these things:
Pension investing is largely unregulated, even though the federal government effectively covers the investment losses when a defined-benefit plan fails. At United, this freewheeling approach gave rise to investments in junk bonds, dot-coms and even what appears to be an energy venture in Albania.
The Securities and Exchange Commission recently said that more than half of the consultants who help pension funds invest their money have outside business relationships that could taint their advice.
It's impossible to get a current list of a company's pension investments. The most detailed, up-to-date information, on file at the Labor Department, is at least two years old.
The Labor Department records also show that the money managers, actuaries, consultants and other professionals who handled United's pension plan earned about $125 million from 1999 to 2003, paid out of plan assets. The records are silent on how the individual money managers performed, nor do they even mention United's main pension consultant, the Russell Investment Group, or how much it was paid.
OFFICIALS at the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the federal agency that takes over pension funds when they fail, are combing through United's pension documents, trying to ascertain how much the agency owes. What is clear is that as United's pension obligations soared, its pension assets fell. By the time the airline turned over its plan to the pension agency, the shortfall was $10.2 billion.
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Companies do not generally invest their pension money themselves, but instead farm out the work to an array of outside professionals. There are pension consultants to help set an investment strategy and recommend the money managers who actually pick the stocks and other particular investments. There are actuaries to design benefits packages and calculate how much companies need to contribute each year.
Custodial banks hold the assets in trust. Brokers execute trades. Once a year, an outside auditor is supposed to review the plan and issue an opinion about its conformity with generally accepted accounting principles.
Problems can arise when there are undisclosed relationships among these different service providers.
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"Pensions are heavily regulated," Mr. Siedle said, "yet it's a kind of funny regulation where the regulators who are responsible for pensions really don't know much about managing money."
Thus there are rules to make sure that pension plans are not really tax shelters in disguise, rules to make sure companies treat low- and high-income workers equitably and, since 1989, rules to keep companies from taking money out of pension funds and using it to run their businesses.
But there is no rule limiting aggressive investment strategies or requiring companies that want to pursue them to pay more for their pension insurance.
Congress sets the premium rates, and there are bills in both houses that would raise them. But even now, the bills make no mention of studying, much less capping, investment risk, or of setting insurance premiums based on portfolio risk factors.
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He said he and Mr. Stone were two-time losers, having earlier lost another chunk of their retirement savings when United first went bankrupt and its employee stock ownership program lost all of its value.
The pilots' union had pushed hard for the employee stock ownership program back in the 1980's, at about the same time that Mr. Wilsman, the retired pilot, noticed that the airline had changed its previous investment policy for people like him.
In the past, whenever a pilot retired, the airline used money from the pension fund to buy him or her an annuity from an insurance company. Annuities are lifelong streams of monthly payments, but insurance companies pay them, not pension funds.
Insurance companies are regulated differently, and they have no federal guarantor like the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation to cover potential losses. Therefore they tend to invest conservatively, in assets that will not become wildly out of step with the payments they owe.
Mr. Wilsman said he thought that an annuity was a surer thing than a pension promise backed by stocks. He also thought United had violated the terms of the pension plan, and maybe the pilots' labor contract, by making the change unilaterally.
He persuaded other retired pilots to join him in bringing a case before the airline's pension board. Each retiree chipped in $25 to cover the cost of a lawyer. At roughly the same time, Mr. Wilsman also filed a grievance with the union.
But the retired pilots were no match for the siren song of the stock market. The union, which handled their grievance, sided with the airline on investment policy. It said it believed that a high-risk, high-return strategy was best because, over time, it would lower United's compensation costs and free up more money to raise salaries.
"The argument was that the new people could get more benefits if they could do it by gambling than if the plan was secure," Mr. Wilsman said.
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