Teamsters Find Pensions at Risk

[Rose Siding]

...Since 1982, under a consent decree with the federal government, the fund has been run by prominent Wall Street firms and monitored by a federal court and the Labor Department. There have been no more shadowy investments, no more loans to crime bosses. Yet in these expert hands, the aging fund has fallen into greater financial peril than when James R. Hoffa, who built the Teamsters into a national power, used it as a slush fund.

The unfolding situation holds a hard lesson for others with responsibility for retirement money. What may appear as a sensible, conventional approach to investing - seeking a diversified mix of growth and income investments for the long term - can wreak havoc when applied to a pension fund, especially one in a dying industry with older members who are about to make demands of it.

But the kinds of investments that make sense for such a fund - like long-term bonds that will mature as members enter retirement - are not attractive to most money managers, because they generate few fees. Consequently, very few pension funds use such strategies today.
..........
...Hoffa and his successors had put an extraordinary 80 percent of Central States' money into real estate. Instead of hotels, casinos and resorts, its new managers - first Morgan Stanley and later Bankers Trust, Goldman Sachs and J. P. Morgan - invested the money mostly in stocks, and to a lesser extent, in bonds.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/15/business/15teamster.html?hp&ex=1100494800&en=f9ebc1dd1dfa1ea3&ei=5094&partner=homepage

[OldLeftieLawyer]

1. Another Republican legacy

When Ronnie Raygun broke the air traffic controllers' union in August of 1981, he paved the way for the likes of Frank Lorenzo, that scum, to start busting unions, and now the idea that pensions are at risk is just another testimony to the emasculation of the unions that the Republicans wanted - and got.

Aren't they the constructive ones?

[Erika]

2. Bush's Run For A Banana Republic

He's salivating at the thought.

[Erika]

3. It Should Also be a Lesson to the Privitazation

of SS.

[brook]

4. My son-in-law...

was just notified by the school district that has employed him for 22 years that he may not be receiving the full benefit package he was promised at retirement.

Right now, of 5 working adults and one toddler, only two in my family have health insurance. It's a sad state of affairs - and going to get worse, I fear.

[cmd]

6. What state?

My health benefits were greatly reduced in Ohio because of Enron and fellow cheats. My pension is still supposed to be solid, but I can never count on that.

[brook]

11. California...

Yeah..let's all get behind changing the Constitution for Ahnold. * hasn't got enough time and power to destroy us - we need to enable his clones? </sarcasm and anger>

[DeadManInc]

5. teamsters

The pensions were better off when the mob controlled them.

[FormerOstrich]

7. woo hoo...let's privatize Social Security....

and the funds managers won't want to invest in non-commission earning investments with that money either. Hear the sucking sound? The 40% to be drained off our retirment funds, too.

They are going to find some way to drain blood out of the turnips.

[Walt Starr]

8. And this is the SAME plan they have for Social Security

In other words, NOBODY retires!

[greekspeak]

9. As the old song says, "the rich get richer and the poor get children."

God forbid that we let a situation go by in which someone doesn't make a profit. While the people who break their backs as teamsters get shafted, someone else is getting rich rich rich. "The Love of Money is the Root of All Evil." What a pithy saying.

[PurityOfEssence]

10. The ones I know are mostly Republican

They're the drivers and Transpo Co-ordinators. If it wasn't for the Location Managers, they'd ALL be Bush supporters.

[marlakay]

12. Are you talking about Pers?

I need to know because we are retiring this summer!

[TahitiNut]

13. "because they generate few fees"

This, in a nutshell, is part of the motive behind throwing pension fund reserves into the 'greater fool' equities markets. This, and the brain-dead cash pumped into market capitalization of mediocre equities, only a miniscule portion of which ever reaches the business, and which inflates derivatives (e.g. options) to further enrich the already wealthy.

[struggle4progress]

14. Ya jest gotta luv all those ownership society folk. eom