this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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How do you think pensions were set up?
The company holding the pension just invested in the market themselves instead of you getting to choose what to invest in yourself, and you lost all of that investment if you left the company before 20 years. There were more strict requirements for what they could invest in, and they had to be much lower risk than what an individual is allowed to invest their own money into. You still had issues with if the stock market tanked, pension funds would be affected.
Talk about people being tied to an employer over health insurance being terrible, you would lose your entire retirement if you left a company.
If you want to talk about a nationwide public pension system, that’s basically what social security is. And guess what, it’s invested in the market too. It’s one of the single largest holders of US bonds. Same with every other government pension system.
The bond market is not the stock market. You're being disingenuous now.
It’s not as volatile, as the stock market, but bonds are still traded the same way and are still risky in certain cases.
Just as an example, Silicon Valley bank failed because they were invested heavily into bonds because they’re “safe” and when the Fed changed rates, they couldn’t liquidate their bonds quick enough to pay out their obligations because nobody wanted to buy the lower interest bonds they held when newer bonds were higher interest.
You can end up in cases where a pension fund can’t liquidate their bonds to make regular payouts during times like now when the Fed is increasing rates to combat inflation.
All investments are risky. With a pension, you’re trusting a company you work for to manage that risk for you in exchange for it being all or nothing based on if you stay there long enough.
With a 401k, you can manage your own risk level yourself. If you want to put it all into bonds, you can do that.
Please explain how GM not making as much profit this year because they are paying their workers more affects the bond market. Because you seem to have forgotten that's what we're talking about.