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美联储主席格林斯潘回忆录——动荡年代：勇闯新世界-118: THE WORLD RETIRES-4



美国的养老保险制度已有200多年历史，经过长期发展，现行养老保险体系主要由三大支柱构成：
1. 由政府主导、强制实施的社会养老保险制度，即联邦退休金制度；
2. 由企业主导、雇主和雇员共同出资的企业补充养老保险制度，即企业年金计划；
3. 由个人负责、自愿参加的个人储蓄养老保险制度，即个人退休金计划。
这三大支柱俗称   “三脚凳”，分别发挥政府、企业和个人作用，相互补充，形成合力，为退休人员提供多渠道、可靠的养老保障。


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The frenzy of politics and the so-farintractable continued increase in income inequality, in my judgment, leaves no other credible political alternative.

Restored balance could occur through the development of private accounts (which I support) or through legislation requiring Medicare to be means-tested (as is Medicaid).

Rationing is the only other realistic possibility, and that has little support in the United States.

Most future Medicare benefits will surely be concentrated in the middle- and lower-income groups.
Medical service for upper-income recipients will have to be funded by unsubsidized private medical insurance or out of pocket, probably in the form of copayments approaching 100 percent.
Many will recoil from the concept of Medicare as welfare, as means-tested programs tend to be seen, but the arithmetic of twenty-first-century demographics in a highly competitive global economy necessitates it.

While I favor a liberal immigration policy, I do not do so as a means of increasing the working population in order to raise social insurance taxes to help address the Social Security/Medicare funding shortfall.
Nor, for reasons I will discuss later, can we count on a fortuitous increase in productivity;
the long-term ceiling for increases in output per hour in the United States appears to be 3 percent a year, with 2 percent being the most likely outcome.

In brief, we likely won't have enough people working, nor will we likely have a sufficient increase in the amount each worker on average can produce, to cover the enormous shortfall from entitlements under current law.

It may not even be close.

With so many unknowns, I fear that given our demographics and the limited upside potential of productivity growth, we may already have committed to a higher level of real medical resources for baby-boomer retirees than our government can realistically deliver.
As previously noted, Congress can enact an entitlement, but that in itself does not produce the economic resources required to provide the hospitals, physicians, nurses, and pharmaceutical companies that will be essential in 2030 to meet the letter of current law.

*How much a cut in benefits would reduce outlays on medical services is uncertain. Several years ago, I requested the Federal Reserve Board staff to simulate the level of medical service outlays through 2004, assuming that Medicare and Medicaid entitlements had never been enacted.

The staff concluded that outlays would have been only modestly lower. Market efficiencies, however, could have been quite considerable.

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THE WORLD RETIRES. BUT CAN IT AFFORD TO?

The size in 2030 of the transfer of real resources from worker-producers to retirees may be too large for the former to accept.
The claims on the nation's output, because of an unfunded expansion of entitlements, may far exceed the output produced by a workforce only marginally
larger than exists today.
In short, the promises may have to be broken, or, perhaps better said, they may have to be "clarified."

The significant uncertainties about the availability of future real resources
are reflected in uncertainties in retiree income replacement rates.

Given today's expected yawning gap between retirement needs and even current large entitlement promises, private pension and insurance benefits are going to have to play an increasingly greater role.
At the end of 2006, private pension funds in the United States had $5.6 trillion in assets: $2.3 trillion in the traditional defined-benefit programs and $3.3 trillion in
defined-contribution plans, largely 401(k)s.*

Private pension and profit-sharing funds paid out $344 billion in benefits in 2005.

By comparison, Social Security and Medicare paid out $845 billion.
The former is bound to catch up with the latter as American workers and their employers take the steps necessary to meet workers' retirement income goals.

But that is years out.
Now, defined-benefit pensions are in trouble.
Those plans can flourish in periods of relatively short life expectancy after retirement and a rapidly growing population.
The unprecedented size of the baby-boom generation and its projected longevity have dramatically reduced the advantages of defined-benefit plans.

Significant pension obligations have already been defaulted to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.

The legal obligation to pay benefits in a defined-benefit plan of course rests with the employer: the pension fund is there for backup.
But since certain levels of funding are mandated by law, corporations view their defined-benefit pension fund as a profit opportunity—the greater the pension fund's
investment revenues, the less additional cash the sponsoring corporation is required to put into the fund.

*In addition, $3.7 trillion was held in individual retirement accounts (IRAs).

Group health insurance paid out an additional $581 billion but predominantly to those under sixty-five years of age.

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THE AGE OF TURBULENCE

And the less the cash infusion, the less the current cost of labor, and the greater the profits. Consequently the corporation is driven to find ways to reduce payments into the fund.

Since corporations know with reasonable certainty who will retire,
when, and with what promised benefits for years into the future, isn't the cost a simple calculation?
Not quite.

The expected cost to a company of a defined-benefit plan depends in part on the status of pension benefits in the event of bankruptcy.

For example, where pension benefits by contract have first claim on corporate resources in the event of default, the calculation of benefit cost is unambiguous.

In such circumstances the corporation might choose to set up a pension fund of riskless U.S. Treasury securities whose maturities match the timing of the benefit payments.
Benefits would be generated by the principal and accumulated interest of a U.S.
Treasury security maturing in the year the benefits are required to be paid.

In practice, corporations try every which way to get around so simple a program because it is the most costly.

Corporate equity, real estate, junk bonds, and even AAA corporate bonds yield a greater return than treasuries.
But all have risk of default, and in the event of default, the sponsoring corporation would have to use its other assets or not pay its pension obligations.

The debate as to what rate of return a pension fund should seek, and therefore how much risk it can accept, depends, in the end, on how certain the corporation wants to be of paying its promised benefits.
The greater the risk to pension assets, the greater the profit margin of the investment.

Financial theory would seem to make the achievement of higher returns illusory.

If the markets are pricing risk correctly, the pension fund's rate of return should be indifferent to the degree of risk in the portfolio,
since higher rates of return compensate for the losses of risky securities,
which often become worthless.

But what is true in theory doesn't always work out in practice. (Or, more appropriately, you need a new theory.) Pension managers will tell you that the actual, realized rates of return over the long run for equities are above the so-called average risk-adjusted rates of return for the U.S. economy as a whole.
Rates of return since the nineteenth century confirm that diversified holdings of stocks over decades-long holding periods have invariably yielded above-average real rates of return.

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THE WORLD RETIRES. BUT CAN IT AFFORD TO?

As I've noted, this is probably the result of an innate human aversion to risk.

Anyone willing to stomach the stress of irrevocable long-term commitments to stocks gains a higher return.
Thus, defined-benefit pension funds that are able to hold investments untouched for decades often keep a majority of their assets in equities.
To lower the cost to the corporation,
defined-benefit pension funds take risks, including the risks of short-run fluctuations in the prices of their equities and other assets.

And those risks, largely through heavy investments in equities, have consequences, both good and bad.

When stock prices are rising, capital gains in effect pay for a significant part of the corporation's contribution to its defined-benefit program.
Since cash contributions are lower, reported profits, accordingly, are higher. Conversely, when stock prices fall, as they did from 2000 to 2002, a large number
of pension plans became underfunded.

There is no getting around the fact that portfolio risks jeopardize retiree benefits.

Many corporations with very large unfunded pension liabilities in recent years, such as steel companies and airlines, have chosen bankruptcy and turned their pension obligations over to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation—that is, largely to the American taxpayer.

Fortunately, the Pension Protection Act of 2006 significantly reduced taxpayers' exposure to private pension shortfalls, but it has by no means eliminated them.

All defined-benefit pension funds yield a rate of return that is variable and, especially in the short run, unpredictable.
But the corporation has a legal obligation to pay a "defined" fixed benefit.
This requires a third party (almost always the sponsoring corporation itself) to swap the variable revenues of a defined-benefit plan portfolio into the fixed payments required by contract.
In recent years, the cost of that swap has grown.

Partly as a consequence, many corporations have adopted defined-contribution pension plans.
The share of total pension fund assets held under defined-benefit plans declined from 65 percent in 1985 to 41 percent at the end of 2006.

The trend shows no signs of abating.
Corporate sponsors of defined-contribution plans will likely become more focused on the forms of investments their employees can make and even on some rules on how quickly, following retirement, such funds can be disbursed.
I anticipate that defined-contribution plans will also gradually displace part of Social Security as the latter's financing capabilities fall with the ratio of workers to retired beneficiaries over time.

421

THE AGE OF TURBULENCE

As the magnitude and implications of the retirement burden gradually become evident to potential retirees, an increasingly healthy elderly population is very likely to find it necessary to postpone retirement.
But of greater relevance, the transfer of real resources from workers to retirees
will of necessity be increasingly financed by 401 (k) plans, private insurance,
and many as yet unidentified new financing vehicles.

In the United States, most higher-income baby boomers have wealth and sources of income that should prove more than adequate to fund retirement.

Middle- and lower-income boomers will find financing more problematic.

Endeavoring to maintain today's pay-as-you-go government-backed social insurance programs, whose arithmetic requires high ratios of workers to retirees, is going to prove increasingly burdensome and unacceptable.

By default, the only viable option almost surely will turn out to be some form of private financing.

I've posed a question in the title of this chapter:
"The World Retires. But Can It Afford To?"

The answer is: It will find ways.
The world has no choice.
Demography is destiny.

422

(未完待续, To be contd)
 

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