Some pensions are at an all time high. I loved this quote from the article:
“This is the pension opportunity of a lifetime,” said Scott Jarboe, a partner at consulting firm Mercer. “Pension plans are better funded than ever.”
Yep. Opportunity for private equity firms to step in and milk them dry?
It doesn’t take PE. A company’s own management can do the same thing. The Fool published this article about Boeing stuffing it’s pension plan with Boeing stock, to partly make up for years of underfunding, in October 17, right when I sold at $260ish. BA closed yesterday at 193ish.
Note that BA’s pension plans were actually overfunded, when McNerney, the Welchist, took over.
Over the past few years, Boeing’s underfunded pension obligations have spiraled wildly out of control as it chose to buy back company stock instead of make payments to the pension plan. A decade ago, the plan was actually overfunded by some $4.7 billion, but beginning in 2008 it began to become underfunded, and today, of all the S&P 500 companies, only General Electric has a worse pension funding shortfall.