America will need “some miracle” to survive the looming economic disaster of $1.3 trillion worth of underfunded government pensions, a former Federal Reserve adviser has warned.
“The average state pension in the last fiscal year returned something south of 1%. You cannot fill that gap with a bulldozer, impossible,” Danielle DiMartino Booth told Real Vision TV.
The median state pension had 74.5 percent of assets needed to meet promised benefits, down from 75.6 percent the prior year. The decline followed two years of gains. The shortfall for states overall was $1.1 trillion in 2015 and has continued to grow.
“Anyone who knows their compounding tables knows you don't make that up. You don't get that back unless you get some miracle,” Business Insider quoted the president of Money Strong as saying.
“The baby boomers are no longer an actuarial theory,” she said. “They're a reality. The checks are being written.”
Pressure on governments to increase pension contributions has mounted because of investment losses during the recession that ended in 2009, benefit increases, rising retirements and flat or declining public payrolls that have cut the number of workers paying in. U.S. state and local government pensions logged median increases of 3.4 percent for the 12 months ended June 30, 2015, according to data from Wilshire Associates.
State and local pensions count on annual gains of 7 percent to 8 percent to pay retirement benefits for teachers, police officers and other civil employees. The funds are being forced to re-evaluate projected investment gains that determine how much money taxpayers need to put into them, given the recent run of lackluster returns.
And while many aging Americans have accepted the “new reality” that they would be retiring at 70 instead of 65, any additional extension won’t be welcome. “They're turning 71. And the physiological decision to stay in the workforce won't work for much longer. And that means that these pensions are going to come under tremendous amounts of pressure,” she said.
“And the idea that we can escape what's to come, given demographically what we're staring at is naive at best. And it's reckless at worst,” DiMartino Booth said. “And when you throw private equity and all of the dry powder that they have -- that they're sitting on -- still waiting to deploy on pensions’ behalf, at really egregious valuations, yeah, it's hard to sleep at night,” she said.
DiMartino Booth cited Dallas as an example of the pensions crisis, where returns for the $2.27 billion Police and Fire Pension System have suffered due to risky investments in real estate.
“We're seeing this surge of people trying to retire early and take the money. Because they see it's not going to be there. And if that dynamic and that belief spreads-- forget all the other problems,” DiMartino Booth said. “The pension fund -- underfunding is Ground Zero.”
DiMartino Booth warned of public violence if her pensions predictions come to fruition. Large pension shortfalls may lead to cuts in services as governments face pressure to pump more cash into the retirement systems.
“This is where the smile comes off my face. We are an angry country. We're an angry world. The wealth effect is dead. The inequality divide is unlike anything we've seen since the years that preceded the Great Depression,” she said.
To be sure, New Jersey became the state with the worst-funded public pension system in the U.S. in 2015, followed closely by Kentucky and Illinois, Bloomberg recently reported.
The Garden State had $135.7 billion less than it needs to cover all the benefits that have been promised, a $22.6 billion increase over the prior year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Illinois’s unfunded pension liabilities rose to $119.1 billion from $111.5 billion.
The two were among states whose retirement systems slipped further behind as rock-bottom bond yields and lackluster stock-market gains caused investment returns to fall short of targets.
(Newsmax wire services contributed to this report).
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