Congress and taxpayers bailed out too-big-to-fail financial firms that now seem interested only in profits; not in repairing damage that they did. This column demonstrates how Wall Street firms and Congress subsidize each other at the expense of the middle class.
Employers created pensions to retain career employees, but when corporations went out of business, the assets to pay pensions sometimes disappeared along with the company. The Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC) was created to insure that pensions would be paid as promised. Like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which insures bank deposits, the PBGC is funded only by insurance premiums, not taxes. Banks pay for FDIC insurance. Pension plans pay for PBGC insurance. The insurance premiums are invested to earn a return that will pay retirees or depositors in case a retirement plan or a bank fails.
When President George W. Bush appointed Charles Millard to direct the PBGC there was a significant but manageable deficit. Millard had been in charge of syndicating real estate investments at Broadway Partners. Rather than raise insurance premiums, he advocated solving PBGC’s problems by purchasing riskier investments in hopes of receiving higher returns. Both the Government Accountability Office and Congress challenged his strategy but he proceeded with paying Wall Street firms to manage the high risk investments.
The Office of Inspector General found evidence that Millard discussed criteria for contracts to manage PBGC funds with favored Wall Street firms, and then set standards that ruled other firms out. He sought and received assistance from a Goldman Sachs executive in finding a new Wall Street position for himself at the same time that he was arranging for Goldman Sachs to be paid for managing $700 million of PBGC funds. After Millard’s policies were implemented, the gap between PBGC assets and the amount needed to fund guaranteed pensions grew from $11 billion to $33 billion. He resigned in 2009 and is now Managing Director of Pension Relations at Citigroup.
When huge banks were failing, Congress saved them by passing the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and other measures which put hundreds of billions of dollars at risk. To stimulate the economy, The Federal Reserve Bank forced interest rates to historic lows. That action caused interest on bonds, a traditional pension plan investment, to sink so low that more pensions are now underfunded. The nation is now showing a profit on TARP. In addition to saving banks, these actions rescued the FDIC and individual depositors from losses they would have incurred if the FDIC ran out of money.
A PBGC insured pension is insured in the same way as an FDIC insured savings account but this month Congress backed out of its commitment to insure about 10 million Americans in “multi-employer” pensions that are operated by multiple companies or by unions in trucking, textiles, mining and other industries where workers switch employers but do the same kind of work. Some pensions have financial problems that result from PBGC investment strategy, actions by the Federal Reserve, and from extremely low insurance premiums that PBGC set for multi-employer plans.
PBGC’s reserves are probably insufficient to cover potential failures. Rather than honor its obligation to retirees, as it did for FDIC banks, Congress shamefully broke its promise. They inserted changes to the pension law into the “must pass” budget bill; allowing no time for public consideration and debate. As a result, vested pensions of many current and future retirees can be reduced by more than half. Retirees did not even know that changes were being considered until after the deal was done.
Another last second addition to the budget allows banks to risk FDIC insured deposits by investing them in the same kinds of derivatives that brought on the recession. If the investments are profitable, the banks will win. If the investments fail, as they did in 2008, taxpayers will again be on the hook to bail out the FDIC. The new law was drafted by lobbyists for Citigroup (Charles Millard’s new employer).
How could this happen? In the current election cycle, Wall Street and real estate interests spent $1.2 billion to influence legislation. That is $1.8 million per day; $2.3 million for every member of congress. They spend money in order to make more money. And that, my friends, is how our Congress and Wall Street firms subsidized each other to put lumps of coal in the Christmas stockings of taxpayers and retirees. The values of the new Congress will become apparent in whether they repeal both of these Wall Street inspired betrayals of the middle class.