Grand Theft

Of course the corporate culprits who decided to rob and destroy company pensions have not seen a day in prison where they belong.

How did this happen?  A new book about pensions attempts to explain it:

I kept on thinking about the market crash of 2008, where bankers were partly saved from public outrage because the public really didn't understand how the system worked. I remember thinking, "This is so complicated that I can't even really get angry about it, because I don't know how it all breaks down."

The retirees didn't understand this was being done to them. They just assumed, "Oh well, this company is affected like everyone else by the economy." They didn't see the role the companies played [in deceiving their employees]. The federal courts found Cigna documents that made it clear that the HR executives were discussing how, if the cutting of employees' benefits was handled right, there wouldn't be an employee backlash because the people wouldn't understand what was happening. And it's a pattern that has existed at a number of other companies.

It may seem odd to you that a person wouldn't know their pension is being cut, from, for example, $20,000 a year to $15,000 or $10,000. But companies have various ways of masking it. One way is to pay people a lump sum when they leave, saying, "Here's a lump sum so you don't need to wait until you're 65 to get a payment." Almost everyone who was attracted to that assumed it was the equivalent amount to a pension because they didn't know about the time value of money and discount rates and so forth.