Why Not Trade Pension Claims?

摘要

According to Wilshire Associates, in 2003, only 62 of the 331 corporations in the S&P 500 Index that maintained defined-benefit plans had pension assets that equaled or exceeded liabilities (Wilshire Research 2004). The median corporate funded ratio of all 331 companies was 82 percent. In many of these companies, the unfunded portion of a pension plan amounted to a sizable fraction of the company's net worth. Funded ratios for terminating plans were generally much lower than the median. According to the Pension Insurance Data Book 2003 (PBGC 2003), only 3.3 percent of claims involved in plans that terminated between 1975 and 2003 had a funded ratio of more than 75 percent and, as Table 1 shows, more than half of all claims faced a funding level of less than 50 percent.