Today’s Federal Register is here.
“Fed explains tricky rules on reporting pension plan health”: Pacific Business News has this regarding a report issued by Simon Kwan for The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco this week explaining “how current accounting practices for corporate pension funds blur reality.”
Another very interesting article by Richard Bernstein for the New York Times on how demographics is making pensions an “urgent political issue” in Europe: “Aging Europe Finds Its Pension Is Running Out.” The article discusses how in Europe the population is both living longer and producing fewer children which is beginning to change some of the fundamentals of both social and political life. The article discusses a study by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, which predicts that the median age in the United States in 2050 will be 35.4, only a very slight increase from what it is now. In Europe, by contrast, it is expected to rise to 52.3 from 37.7. The article states: “The likely meaning of this “stunning difference,” as the British weekly The Economist called the growing demographic disparity between Europe and the United States, is that American power–economic and military–will continue to grow relative to Europe’s, which will also decline in comparison with other parts of the world like China, India and Latin America.”
Kris Frieswick for CFO.com reports: “Age Discrimination Snags Lurking in Pension Rules: New federal pension rules are drawing fire from both sides of the cash-balance plan debate.”
This report by Jonathan Weil for the Wall Street Journal: “More frequent disclosures on the way for US pension plans.” The article reports on FASB’s decision last week to require US companies to disclose the impact, in dollar amounts, that the various parts of their pension plans have on each quarter’s earnings. The article states that ”[r]eaders of a public company’s financial statements would also be able to see for the first time the degree to which various line items on a company’s income statement were boosted or dragged down by pension-plan activities.”