Catherwood LibraryILR School

With the stock market investments on which they are based faltering, the pension plans of many major U.S. companies including Ford, GM, SBC Communications, most steel producers and all airlines except Southwest, are under funded according to analysts. The problem is being compounded by corporations’ use of unrealistic investment growth assumptions to delay using profits, reserves or loans to shore up the failing pension funds. As a result, pension plans at some of these corporations are short by as much as $9 billion of the amount needed to meet their future obligations---a potential crisis which companies continue to address by further increasing their predicted rates of return on investments even as actual rates of return continue to fall.