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Weekend reading: The Economist does pensions

Some great reads from around the Web.

Hello? Hello? It’s hard to be sure anyone is reading out there, given how the first four-day Brucie Bonus bank holiday of the year has coincided with – well – summer.

London has gone all Club Med, and even I feel like some ascetic monk, sat writing this on a Saturday morning while the sun blazes outside.

But YOU have come to Monevator (or opened your email [1]) despite the competing attractions of burnt Tesco Finest sausages, traffic jams, and ogling the opposite sex in the park, for which I thank you.

Then again, maybe you’re reading on Tuesday.

Either way, the slight swizz is that my post of the week is actually from two week’s ago, when a fabulously detailed special report [2] on pensions popped up at The Economist. But I missed it, and you shouldn’t.

This opening fact sets the tone:

When Gertrude Janeway died in 2003, she was still getting a monthly cheque for $70 from the Veterans Administration—for a military pension earned by her late husband, John, on the Union side of the American civil war that ended in 1865.

The pair had married in 1927, when he was 81 and she was 18. The amount may have been modest but the entitlement spanned three centuries, illustrating just how long pension commitments can last.

And so the gravity of the situation pulls us in:

Make sure you follow the links in the sidebar towards the top of The Economist’s introduction to see all the issues this huge report explores.

The piece on changes in how UK companies account for pensions [3], for instance, may make interesting reading for anyone who invests directly into UK shares, some of which now seem primarily funds with a business bolted on, so swamped are they by their pension liabilities.

I tend to take a complacent view, even considering pension liabilities as an artifact of bear market conditions that will eventually juice my returns. But given the revamped powers of pension trustees in the UK, one can argue this view is too relaxed.

Alternatively, one can grab an ice-cream and save the arguments for when the sun stops shining!

From the money and investing blogs

Mainstream media articles

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