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I like it — more recognition of reality…

Last month, I presented to the National Association of State Treasurers. The room had all 50 State Treasurers, lots of Deputy and Asst Treasurers, and staff. I was realistic about how credit crises unwind over long periods of time.

The prior panel had the major ratings agency reps, and they had discussed Pension Return Assumptions. Given their utter incompetency, it was no surprise the Ratings firms were okay with expected blended returns of 8%.

An audience member asked a question to me about this, and I laughed. I told the Treasurers that the consultants who tell them they should have expected 8% blended returns for the past 5-10 years were dead wrong, and the ones who told them they could expect 8% blended returns for the next 5-10 years were probably high. My joke was to get to 8% required bad math — blended expected returns of 8% requires taking 5% gains in equities and adding 3% gains in bonds (5+3=8).  How often do you get to make a wonky accounting joke to a room full of treasurers?

They’re high all right — that is, high on drugs.

This is their set of assumption:

What Barry is missing in his missive, however, is why this appears to have worked up until the last ten years.  The answer is found in my favorite chart, once again:

Let’s look at what the market did as a consequence:

Look closely at those two charts.  What I want you to pay attention to is the overlay.  Here:

Notice anything?

What coincided with the ramp from 1980 forward?  Let’s go back ten more years, because it makes the point much clearer.  We’ll do it with a nice overlay.

So we had a nice stable stock market, with reasonably-stable leverage (growth in debt .vs. growth in GDP.)  Then we started emitting unbacked credit, and lots of it.  The market responded.  We emitted more.  The market responded more.

But then, in 2000, we hit the wall.  The emission of new credit over output no longer worked because it was impossible to service the debt with available economic surplus, and the market collapsed.

The response?  Even easier credit.  Liars loans.  Zero-down mortgages.  Goading people into speculating on property, taking out HELOCs to buy Suburbans and similar.  Frauds were run throughout the financial system in order to prop this up, including issuing CDS and various securities based on claimed credit quality that the writers knew damn well was impossible, as there was at the time a 20 year history that showed credit expansion and thus asset price inflation was the only way it could possibly “work.”

Nobody knew, of course, exactly when the wall would be hit, but that it would happen was inevitable and mathematically certain.

Well now “when” has happened.  Yet the same projections on a forward basis are still being run, despite the fact that further credit creation to maintain this bubble in asset prices is not possible, as there’s no ability to pay higher and higher percentages of income in debt service!

This — basic mathematics — is at the root of the problem with these “forecasts.”  The people who have made them might have been excused if they made them in 1970 if the goal is to get to 2000, since there’s a “time certain” on the end game.  That might have been defensible.

But it’s not defensible on an infinite-forward-horizon basis, which retirement systems always are, since there will always be someone new coming in behind the guy who retires — unless you’re forecasting (and so stating!) the end of the government and/or the company involved on that future “date certain.”

The dynamic that drove this insanity from the mid to late 1970s up until the collapse in 2000 is over.  The “last gasp” of fraud attempted in the 2000s to keep the consequences from coming home to roost not only failed it also doubled the damage we must accept in our economy now from what it was in 2000.

This was not an accident and it was not simple “greed.”  It was an intentional series of actions and inactions.  It was willful in both activity (deficit spending) and blindness (to indefensible acts by financial institutions) by our government acting in concert with The Fed, including the current Chair Ben Bernanke.  May I remind everyone that Ben was with The Fed at the time of Greenspan’s actions in the early part of the 2000 decade prior to assuming the Chair?

Do not kid yourselves folks.  This is literally 5th grade mathematics — the simple story of exponential growth gone mad, and the inevitable mathematical consequence of two compound functions where one has a higher rate of growth (debt, in this case) than the other (economic output.)

Today, as I write this, we have still not recognized and accepted that this path cannot continue as it is mathematically impossible for it to “work” as we are being told and sold.

The Market-Ticker

Discussion below (registration required to post)

Pension plans are based on 8% annual growth forever. What happens to these plans in a zero-interest rate world as the global economy and stock markets contract?

I’m afraid it’s time for an intervention.  I don’t enjoy being the bearer of difficult news, but now that Europe has stumbled drunkenly into the pool and been “rescued,” it’s once again tearfully blubbering that this time it’s all going to change, and a new prime minister in each dysfunctional, insolvent EU nation is  going to make the pain and the addiction all go away.

It’s time we face the reality that Europe and the U.S. are full-blown financial alcoholics, addicted to illusion and debt. And what do they turn to as “solutions”?  The very sources of their pain:  illusory “fixes” and more debt.Have you ever seen a  global market as dependent on rumors of “magical fixes” for its “resilience” as this one?

What’s truly remarkable is the psychotic distance between the facts–Europe’s debts are impossible to service, its economy is free-falling into recession, the U.S. is already in recession, China’s real estate bubble has popped and cannot be reinflated– and the heady leap of global markets on every trivial rumor of a magic fix.

Since it runs in our family, I do not use the word “alcoholic” lightly. Those of you who have to deal with alcoholics know the drill: the liquor stashed behind the fridge, as if everyone doesn’t know it’s there; the stumbling into the pool, the humiliating rescue, the tearful promise of change which goes  nowhere, and all the rest.

I seriously suspect the entire global economy is alcoholic–not about liquor, but about debt and the impossibility of paying entitlements which expand by 8% a year in an economy which grows by 2% a year at best.In all the millions of words printed about the subprime meltdown,  the gutting of the U.S. financial and housing markets and  now about Europe’s impossible burden of debt, how often have we seen anyone in the MSM or mainstream financial press confess that “borrowing our way of out  of trouble” is not just financially bankrupt but morally bankrupt as well?

Like a full-blown alcoholic, the people and governments of the U.S. and Europe stagger from  debt source to debt source, weaving drunkenly between “stashes” of new debt in the Fed, Treasury and private sector markets.Despite the abject failure of the magical-thinking “fix” of becoming solvent by exponentially expanding debt, we see the same pathetic pattern repeating in Europe, where the apologists for the alcoholic debt-binge continue to claim the risk of systemic failure and collapse of asset values is low.

While everyone is focused on the drunk being pulled from the pool–Europe’s sovereign debt–another drunk is teetering on the edge: public and private pension plans.Here’s the reality in a nutshell: pension plans only work if they earn average returns of around 8% per year, basically forever.

Gripped by the mono-maniacal desperation of an addict who sees no other path but another hit, central banks have lowered interest rates to near-zero to “spark growth.” Unfortunately the only thing being goosed is the future cost of servicing the additional  debt.

How do you earn 8% on money which yields at best 3%? You can’t. How do you reap a gain on bonds when interest rates have already hit bottom and can’t fall any lower? You can’t.

Which leaves the stock market as the only hope for pension plans.  Since the bottom in March 2009, central banks engineered a “magic solution” that generated fantastic stock market returns: by constantly lowering interest rates and increasing liquidity, central banks force-fed stock markets with demand (there was no other place to get a fat return) and the see-saw of interest rates and “risk-on” equity markets: as rates decline, equities floated ever higher.

Now that rates are near-zero, then the central banks are pushing on a string: there is no “magic” left to juice equity markets.

The equity markets are in effect living on vitamin C and cocaine:rumors of new “magic fixes” and the hit of central bank infusions.

Once rumor is no longer enough to float markets higher, then the consequences of depending on stock market returns will hit pensions with a terminal case of the DTs.

The “magic” of ramping up debt to create the illusion of a healthy economy only works  once.The “fix” “worked” from 2009 to 2011, but now the high is wearing off. The next round of rumor and debt expansion won’t even create the illusion of growth, as the global economy is already careening back into the contraction that trillions in new debt staved off for three years.

I have covered the disconnect between the promises of 8% yields forever built into public pension plans and a slow-growth/no-growth economy many times:

Yes, There Will Be Armageddon: Government Goes Bankrupt  (July 24, 2008)

How the Fed Pushed the Nation’s Pension Plans–and Local Government–into Insolvency   (May 24, 2010)

Public Pension and Healthcare Costs and Financial Common Sense   (February 28, 2011)

Every once in a while an MSM outlet addresses the issue directly, for example:

Pension issue balloons with soaring costs(S.F. Chronicle):

Pension costs  are soaring to $800 million, tripling during the last decade, as Los Angeles faces  years of projected budget deficits even with deep cuts in services and staff.The main driver of higher pension costs is the stock market crash. CalPERS (California’s primary public pension plan) gets  about 75 percent of its revenue from investment earnings. Its portfolio peaked  at $260 billion in 2007, fell to $160 billion last year and now is about $204 billion.

Why economic growth isn’t enough to fix budgets:

But under the laws now dominating government budgets, many expenditures essentially are or will be growing faster than both revenues and the rest of the economy. In fact, in many areas of the budget, automatic expenditure growth matches or outstrips revenue growth under almost any conceivable rate of economic growth.Now, so much spending growth is built into permanent or mandatory programs that they essentially absorb much or all revenue growth. Meanwhile, we’ve also cut taxes, widening the gap between available revenues and growing spending levels.

Consider government retirement programs. Most are effectively “wage-indexed” insofar as a 10 percent higher growth rate of wages doesn’t just raise taxes on those wages, it also raises the annual benefits of all future retirees by 10 percent. Meanwhile, in most retirement systems, employees stop working at fixed ages, even though for decades Americans have been living longer.

Today, so much of government spending is devoted to health and retirement programs that their growing costs tend to swamp gains we might achieve in holding down the ever-smaller portion of the budget devoted to discretionary spending. Still other programs add to the problem, such as tax subsidies for employee benefits, the cost of which grows automatically without any new legislation.

In other words, the entire system of state and local government is now based on the same 8% “permanent high growth” of the 1990s speculative market.Funding increases are wired in, regardless of how much tax revenues fall.  That is a recipe for insolvency.

Now we get to the heart of the matter. Which institution engineered  the heady stock market bubble of the 1990s that created the illusion of “permanent high returns” and growth of tax receipts?  The Federal Reserve.Which institution has made the stock market the proxy for the economy?  The Federal Reserve.  Which institution has engineered a three-year stock market rally to put off the inevitable implosion of pension plans, entitlements and tax revenues that must grow by 8% annually while the real economy is flat-lined? The Federal Reserve.

We can ask the same questions of Europe and get the same answer there, too: the European Central Bank (ECB).

Addiction is a terrible disease, founded on the illusion that the pain of facing reality can be put off forever by dulling the pain of addiction itself with ever-higher doses of self-destruction. We are witnessing the self-destruction of economies and machines of governance that have chosen denial, illusion, rumor and magical thinking over facing reality. The drunk has been pulled from the pool once again, slobbering self-piteously and promising to really, really  change tomorrow, and we believe the lie, at least until morning, because  hope is so much easier than reality.

Charles Hugh Smith – Of Two Minds

Over the past couple of years, most Americans have shown little concern as austerity measures were imposed on financially troubled nations across Europe.  Even as austerity riots erupted in nations such as Greece and Spain, most Americans were still convinced that nothing like that could ever happen here.  Well, guess what?  Austerity has arrived in America.  At this point, it is not a formal, mandated austerity like we have seen in Europe, but the results are just the same.  Taxes are going up, services are being slashed dramatically, thousands of state and city employees are being laid off, and politicians seem to be endlessly talking about ways to make even deeper budget cuts.  Unfortunately, even with the incredibly severe budget cuts that we have seen already, many state and local governments across the United States are still facing a sea of red ink as far as the eye can see.

Most Americans tend to think of “government debt” as only a problem of the federal government.  But that is simply not accurate.  The truth is that there are thousands of “government debt problems” from coast to coast.  Today, state and local government debt has reached at an all-time high of 22 percent of U.S. GDP.  It is a crisis of catastrophic proportions that is not going away any time soon.

A recent article in the New York Times did a good job of summarizing the financial pain that many state governments are feeling right now.  Unfortunately, as bad as the budget shortfalls are for this year, they are projected to be even worse in 2012….

While state revenues — shrunken as a result of the recession — are finally starting to improve somewhat, federal stimulus money that had propped up state budgets is vanishing and costs are rising, all of which has left state leaders bracing for what is next. For now, states have budget gaps of $26 billion, by some estimates, and foresee shortfalls of at least $82 billion as they look to next year’s budgets.

So what is the solution? Well, for state and local politicians from coast to coast, the answer to these financial problems is to impose austerity measures.  Of course they never, ever use the term “austerity measures”, but that is exactly what they are.

The following are 22 signs that austerity has already arrived in America and that it is going to be very, very painful….

#1 The financial manager of the Detroit Public Schools, Robert Bobb, has submitted a proposal to close half of all the schools in the city.  His plan envisions class sizes of up to 62 students in the remaining schools.

#2 Detroit Mayor Dave Bing wants to cut off 20 percent of the entire city from police and trash services in order to save money.

#3 Things are so tight in California that Governor Jerry Brown is requiring approximately 48,000 state workers to turn in their government-paid cell phones by June 1st.

#4 New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is proposing to completely eliminate 20 percent of state agencies.

#5 New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has closed 20 fire departments at night and is proposing layoffs in every single city agency.

#6 In the state of Illinois, lawmakers recently pushed through a 66 percent increase in the personal income tax rate.

#7 The town of Prichard, Alabama came up with a unique way to battle their budget woes recently.  They simply stopped sending out pension checks to retired workers.  Of course this is a violation of state law, but town officials insist that they just do not have the money.

#8 New Jersey Governor Chris Christie recently purposely skipped a scheduled 3.1 billion dollar payment to that state’s pension system.

#9 The state of New Jersey is in such bad shape that they still are facing a $10 billion budget deficit for this year even after cutting a billion dollars from the education budget and laying off thousands of teachers.

#10 Due to a very serious budget shortfall, the city of Newark, New Jersey recently made very significant cuts to the police force.  Subsequently, there has been a very substantial spike in the crime rate.

#11 The city of Camden, New Jersey is “the second most dangerous city in America”, but because of a huge budget shortfall they recently felt forced to lay off half of the city police force.

#12 Philadelphia, Baltimore and Sacramento have all instituted “rolling brownouts” during which various city fire stations are shut down on a rotating basis.

#13 In Georgia, the county of Clayton recently eliminated its entire public bus system in order to save 8 million dollars.

#14 Oakland, California Police Chief Anthony Batts has announced that due to severe budget cuts there are a number of crimes that his department will simply not be able to respond to any longer.  The crimes that the Oakland police will no longer be responding to include grand theft, burglary, car wrecks, identity theft and vandalism.

#15 In Connecticut, the governor is asking state legislators to approve the biggest tax increase that the state has seen in two decades.

#16 All across the United States, conditions at many state parks, recreation areas and historic sites are deplorable at best.  Some states have backlogs of repair projects that are now over a billion dollars long.  The following is a quote from a recent MSNBC article about these project backlogs….

More than a dozen states estimate that their backlogs are at least $100 million. Massachusetts and New York’s are at least $1 billion. Hawaii officials called park conditions “deplorable” in a December report asking for $50 million per year for five years to tackle a $240 million backlog that covers parks, trails and harbors.

#17 The state of Arizona recently announced that it has decided to stop paying for many types of organ transplants for people enrolled in its Medicaid program.

#18 Not only that, but Arizona is do desperate for money that they have even sold off the state capitol building, the state supreme court building and the legislative chambers.

#19 All over the nation, asphalt roads are actually being ground up and are being replaced with gravel because it is cheaper to maintain.  The state of South Dakota has transformed over 100 miles of asphalt road into gravel over the past year, and 38 out of the 83 counties in the state of Michigan have transformed at least some of their asphalt roads into gravel roads.

#20 The state of Illinois is such a financial disaster zone that it is hard to even describe.  According to 60 Minutes,  the state of Illinois is six months behind on their bill payments.  60 Minutes correspondent Steve Croft asked Illinois state Comptroller Dan Hynes how many people and organizations are waiting to be paid by the state, and this is how Hynes responded….

“It’s fair to say that there are tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people waiting to be paid by the state.”

#21 The city of Chicago is in such dire straits financially that officials there are actually toying with the idea of setting up a city-owned casino as a way to raise cash.

#22 Michigan Governor Rick Snyder is desperately looking for ways to cut the budget and he says that “hundreds of jurisdictions” in his state could go bankrupt over the next few years.

But everything that you have just read is only the beginning.  Budget shortfalls for our state and local governments are projected to be much worse in the years ahead.

So what is the answer?  Well, our state and local governments are going to have to spend less money.  That means that we are likely to see even more savage budget cutting.

In addition, our state and local politicians are going to feel intense pressure to find ways to “raise revenue”.  In fact, we are already starting to see this happen.

According to the National Association of State Budget Officers, over the past couple of years a total of 36 out of the 50 U.S. states have raised taxes or fees of some sort.

So hold on to your wallets, because the politicians are going to be coming after them.

We are entering a time of extreme financial stress in America.  The federal government is broke.  Most of our state and local governments are broke.  Record numbers of Americans are going bankrupt.  Record numbers of Americans are being kicked out of their homes.  Record numbers of Americans are now living in poverty.

The debt-fueled prosperity of the last several decades came at a cost.  We literally mortgaged the future.  Now nothing will ever be the same again.

The Economic Collapse

As the first of the 80 million Baby Boomers have begun to retire, it has become increasingly apparent that the United States is facing a pension crisis of unprecedented magnitude.  State and local government pension plans are woefully underfunded, dozens of large corporate pension plans either have collapsed or are on the verge of collapsing, Social Security is a complete and total financial disaster and about half of all Americans essentially have nothing saved up for retirement.  So yes, to say that we are facing a retirement crisis would be a tremendous understatement.  There is simply no way that we can keep all of the financial promises that we have made to the Baby Boomer generation.  Unfortunately, the crumbling U.S. economy simply cannot support the comfortable retirement of tens of millions of elderly Americans any longer.  The truth is that we are all going to have to start fundamentally changing the way that we think about our golden years.

Once upon a time, you could count on getting a big, fat pension if you put 30 years into a job.  But now pension plans everywhere are failing.  State and local governments are cutting back and are raising retirement ages.  A majority of Americans have even lost faith in the Social Security system, which was supposed to be the most secure of them all.

The reality is that we are moving into a time when there is not going to be such a thing as “financial security” as we have known it in the past.  Things have fundamentally changed, and we are all going to have to struggle to stay above water in the economic nightmare that is coming.

Part of the reason we have such a gigantic economic mess on the way is because we have promised vastly more than we can deliver to future retirees.  When you closely examine the numbers, it quickly becomes clear that a financial tsunami is about to hit us that is going to be so devastating that it will change everything that we know about retirement. 

The following are 22 statistics about America’s coming pension crisis that will make you lose sleep at night…. 

Private Pension Plans And Retirement Funds

1 - One recent study found that America’s 100 largest corporate pension plans were underfunded by $217 billion at the end of 2008.

2 – Approximately half of all workers in the United States have less than $2000 saved up for retirement.

3 – According to one recent survey, 36 percent of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything at all to retirement savings.

4 – The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation says that the number of pensions at risk inside failing companies more than tripled during the recession.

5 – According to another recent survey, 24% of U.S. workers admit that they have postponed their planned retirement age at least once during the past year.

State And Local Government Pensions

6- Pension consultant Girard Miller recently told California’s Little Hoover Commission that state and local government bodies in the state of California have $325 billion in combined unfunded pension liabilities.  When you break that down, it comes to $22,000 for every single working adult in California.

7 – According to a recent report from Stanford University, California’s three biggest pension funds are as much as $500 billion short of meeting future retiree benefit obligations.

8 – In New Jersey, the governor has proposed not making the state’s entire $3 billion contribution to its pension funds because of the state’s $11 billion budget deficit.

9 – It has been reported that the $33.7 billion Illinois Teachers Retirement System is 61% underfunded and is on the verge of total collapse.

10 – The state of Illinois recently raised its retirement age to 67 and capped the salary on which public pensions are figured.

11 – The state of Virginia is requiring employees to pay into the state pension fund for the first time ever.

12 – In New York City, annual pension contributions have increased sixfold in the past decade alone and are now so large that they would be able to finance entire new police and fire departments.

13- Robert Novy-Marx of the University of Chicago and Joshua D. Rauh of Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management recently calculated the combined pension liability for all 50 U.S. states.  What they found was that the 50 states are collectively facing $5.17 trillion in pension obligations, but they only have $1.94 trillion set aside in state pension funds.  That is a difference of 3.2 trillion dollars.

Social Security

14 – According to one recently conducted poll, 6 out of every 10 non-retirees in the United States believe that the Social Security system will not be able to pay them benefits when they stop working.

15 – A very large percentage of the federal budget is made up of entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare that cannot be reduced without a change in the law.  Approximately 57 percent of Barack Obama’s 3.8 trillion dollar budget for 2011 consists of direct payments to individual Americans or is money that is spent on their behalf.

16 – 35% of Americans over the age of 65 rely almost entirely on Social Security payments alone.

17 – According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Social Security system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes in 2010.  That was not supposed to happen until at least 2016.  The Social Security deficits are projected to get increasingly worse in the years ahead. 

18 – 56 percent of current retirees believe that the U.S. government will eventually cut their Social Security benefits.

19 - In 1950, each retiree’s Social Security benefit was paid for by 16 U.S. workers.  In 2010, each retiree’s Social Security benefit is paid for by approximately 3.3 U.S. workers.  By 2025, it is projected that there will be approximately two U.S. workers for each retiree.

20 – The shortfall in entitlement programs in the years ahead is mind blowing.  The present value of projected scheduled benefits surpasses earmarked revenues for entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare by about 46 trillion dollars over the next 75 years. 

21 – According to a recent U.S. government report, soaring interest costs on the U.S. national debt plus rapidly escalating spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare will absorb approximately 92 cents of every single dollar of federal revenue by the year 2019.  That is before a single dollar is spent on anything else.

22 – Right now, interest on the U.S. national debt and spending on entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare is somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 percent of GDP.  By 2080, those combined expenditures are projected to eat up approximately 50 percent of GDP.

The Economic Collapse

By Karl Denninger