杰克·科恩是一个代表23万退休人员的集团的主席，他曾经为1984年马贝尔分手后出现的公司工作，他不想被剥夺风险。
在a recent interview Cohen quoted a line from an亚博赞助欧冠故事关于2008年后华尔街的转型以及新的监管如何成功地将风险贷款从银行推出来，交给资产管理者。科恩严肃地笑着说：“冒险不能被摧毁，只能从一个地方转移到另一个地方。”。他把关于Association of BellTel Retirees’ lawsuit to stop corporations from transferring their pension responsibilities around this point: Companies such as his former employer Verizon Communications like to talk about eliminating their pension liabilities and may be able to financially engineer deals — known in industry parlance as pension risk transfers — to remove some of the threats that their promises to retirees pose to their current earnings, but the “de” in “de-risking” is a lie. Instead, he says, Verizon, Ford Motor Co., General Motors Co., J.C. Penney Co. and all the other companies that have done these transactions have just shifted the risk to pensioners themselves. “Pensions are a vanishing breed,” bemoans Cohen, 73, who began his 26-year career with Verizon in 1968 with a sales job at what was then called New York Telephone Co.
Pension risk transfers allow corporations to either move their defined benefit liabilities to an insurance company — along with sufficient assets to back those promises — or directly provide employees with a lump sum of cash that represents what they earned during their tenure. If corporations and insurance companies have come up with dry jargon to describe their efforts to get out from under pensions, it is Cohen who puts the process in more-colorful terms. “Corporations want to get rid of their legacy costs,” he says. “They call them an albatross on their neck, but I call them earned benefits.”
科恩的组织贝尔特尔退休人员协会（Association of BellTel Re退休人员）正在提出一份关于Certorari令状的请愿书，该申请书敦促美国最高法院审查其针对Verizon的案件，该诉讼指控该公司违反了员工退休收入保障法案。案件从2012年购买Verizon击中的交易中，从审慎的金融和旋转41,000个退休人员的负债向保险公司购买了41,000人的负债。在Pundt.v。Verizon Communications Inc., the plaintiffs — pensioners who were left behind in Verizon’s plan after the annuity purchase — claim that a series of conflicting decisions by lower circuit courts on companies’ responsibilities under federal pension law undermine ERISA as a national standard. The plaintiffs want the Supreme Court to give the Verizon retirees “standing” — the right to sue — even though their benefits have not yet been hurt. Waiting for proof of harm, which a lower court said it needed to do, will be too late, they argue. Cohen hopes to stop companies from cutting their ties to retirees in the future.
这是一个重要的案例，因为美国公司越来越希望摆脱二战以来他们对雇员做出的昂贵退休承诺所带来的一些或全部风险。尽管在ERISA下，雇主始终能够从保险公司购买年金来支付退休人员的福利或一次性提供，但监管改革和更长的寿命，促使企业近年来对养老金风险进行了认真思考。2007年至2013年期间，500多家公司进行了风险转移交易。市场通过提高从事交易的公司的股价来奖励交易，包括美国保诚保险公司在内的大型保险公司（包括由保诚金融控股的美国保诚保险公司）和大都人寿（MetLife）都渴望承担这些义务，这既为新业务提供了丰富的来源，又为嵌入其中的死亡率风险提供了对冲他们的人寿保险单。
现在退休人员及其倡导者正在就这些交易中的潜在利益风险以及保险公司作为富裕国家和发展中国家的人口以前所未有的速度达到退休年龄的扩大金融服务作用提出质疑。
The corporate pension has been pronounced dead multiple times during the past few decades, but everybody is still picking at the carcass. The asset management industry, whose growth was initially fueled by the trillions of dollars held in defined benefit pension funds, sees opportunity in helping companies build portfolios that may ultimately appeal to insurance companies. Insurers view the business as fertile ground that requires their core expertise of hedging liabilities, and reinsurers are innovating in areas like longevity risk — the possibility that pensioners will essentially live too long.
美国政府也与结果有利害关系。尽管风险转移协议减少了养老金福利担保公司的潜在风险敞口，但它们可能削弱该机构——该机构是40多年前为企业养老金保险而成立的——因为最健康的计划被取消，而且会失去保费。尽管如此，政府还是谨慎，不想削弱养老金，增加老年美国人对社会保障和其他安全网的依赖。联邦、州和地方的养老金已经面临7万亿美元的缺口，去年约占美国GDP的40%。
养老金风险转移交易改变了每个人的景观：公司，保险公司，资产管理人员，政府和退休人员。他们将特定公司的养老金风险分配给保险公司和再保险公司。养老金领取者的倡导者争辩说，个人也在承担其中一些风险。当养老金被养老金所取代时，他们将从联邦监督和担保下扣除PBGC。相反，养老金领取者受保险法规的约束，担保协会的实力会因国家而异;在一些国家，退休收入第一次易受攻击债权人。其他人认为退休人员正在浪费宝贵的能量担心，担心养老金风险转移策略 - 是威胁的威胁。事实上，由于法规中的怪癖，鼓励公司提供一次性团块，这需要员工来管理储蓄储蓄的风险。
W. Thomas Reeder Jr.同意养老金风险转移重新排序定义的福利世界。作为PBGC的主任，他担心公司可能会将较低风险的负债转移到保险公司，而在继续被原子能机构继续涵盖的计划中保持着更高的风险。PBGC已开始分析交易，但它还没有足够的数据来吸引任何公司的结论。“公司正在致力于缩小其负债的规模，”雷德尔说，在去年10月加入PBGC之前，在美国财政部税务政策办公室工作税务咨询。“我们担心对我们的利率基础和退休保障的影响。”
Although thePBGC’s soundnesshas been questioned over the years — the agency relies on fees, its investments and assets from pension plans that it takes over as trustee, and it is not backed by the full faith of the U.S. government — pensioners worry more about the health of insurance companies. They aren’t alone: Last year the国际货币基金组织在一份报告中表示that the transfer of pension risks to the insurance industry could itself pose a risk as financial institutions become more interconnected. The IMF contended that “too big to fail” insurance companies are imperiling workers’ pensions and may need to be better regulated.
4月，美国联邦通信工作者对Verizon发起罢工的同一个月，IMF再次警告大型保险公司的系统性风险。最近的谨慎发生在几天前，作为从事养老金交易的最大保险公司之一的大都人寿成功地与美国政府指定的作为一个系统重要性金融机构的称号抗争，而美人寿本来就要求它持有更多资本，并接受更多监督。
显然,保险公司在洛杉矶rger role in financial services in the U.S. than ever before. Since the 1970s asset managers have profited from investing baby boomers’ retirement savings, but now this generation of 60-somethings is turning away from fund managers who know how to invest assets and to insurers for retirement income — either directly through defined contribution plans and annuities or indirectly through defined benefit plans.
尽管如此，可以提出强大的案例，交易有助于公司降低养老金义务的风险。像福特这样的公司可能比制造汽车更好管理长寿风险。Risk transfers can position companies to compete with younger businesses (likeTesla Motors在这种情况下，其工作人员被界定的捐助计划所涵盖，其中雇员承担创建巢蛋的风险。可以说，退休人员还希望更健康的公司更好地定位，以便甚至在年金和一次性交易之后留下留下的养老金领取者的义务。
When corporate vice president and treasurer Robert O’Keef was leading an effort to evaluate the viability of a pension risk transfer for Motorola Solutions, the Schaumburg, Illinois–based company had $11 billion in global retirement liabilities for 95,000 participants. Created in January 2011 after Motorola spun off its mobile phone business to focus solely on public safety and government communications, Motorola Solutions has just $6 billion in annual revenue and 15,000 employees. Relative to the size of the company, “we had one of the largest pension obligations of any company in the U.S., whatever yardstick you used — revenue, market cap or employee base,” O’Keef says. In 2014, Motorola transferred $3.1 billion in U.S. liabilities for 31,000 retirees.
The Pension Protection Act of 2006 pushed companies like Motorola and Verizon to come clean about their obligations and spurred the current risk transfer movement. Though some retirement advocates call it the Pension Destruction Act, the PPA was designed to safeguard beneficiaries by requiring companies to report shortfalls on their balance sheets. “The risk that companies have always had on their balance sheets has become more real as the result of regulations,” explains Scott Hawkins, who heads insurance research and consulting at Conning & Co., a $103 billion, Hartford, Connecticut–based insurance asset manager.
像大多数立法一样，PPA有意外后果。公司开始重新设计他们的投资组合，以减轻风险并防止盈利中的波动，冻结对新参与者的现有计划以及关于将负债转移到保险公司的讨论 - 其纳里森D'TERE将来能够处理未来可能发生的风险的组织。PBGC的雷德尔强调这些交易旨在坐拥公司财务状况。“如果每个人都有较小的计划，我们希望他们能够更好地管理它们，”他说。
Pension risk transfer deals are a function of both record-low interest rates and people living longer. Given these two trends, companies have had to face painfully high liabilities. By keeping rates low since the financial crisis, global central banks have punished anyone trying to save for the future. Not surprisingly, pension consulting firm Milliman says the funded status of the 100 largest corporate defined benefit plansdropped by $83 billion during the first quarter of 2016。公司只有78％的金额，他们需要履行承诺。“低利率对于最有经验的CIO有挑战性，”高盛资产管理（GSAM）的养老战战博士迈克尔·莫兰说。“公司有养老金疲劳。”
Gary Veerman, a贝莱德Solutions managing director who oversees investments such as liability-driven investment strategies for corporate pension clients, says, “If companies don’t buy annuities or offer lump sums, they are, in essence, self-insuring — locking down the risks of their own plans.”
养老金风险转移对美国的普照公正地是新的，尽管审慎在1928年与克利夫兰公共图书馆进行了第一次这样的收购。最近的趋势在美国养老金改革之后。根据谨慎的情况，2007年至2015年6月至2015年6月，U.K.公司将于保险公司转移了1800亿美元。美国在同一时间段中看到了670亿美元的交易。
作为Belltel的Cohen等几十年来工作赢得了福利的退休人士正在哀叹他们的养老金被归还给第三方保险公司。这些举措是美国和世界各地的大型谈话的一部分，关于政府，纳税人，私营部门和退休计划中的个人的作用 - 以及遵守长期风险。寿命更长，老龄化人口结合起来使养老金数学几乎是不可能的。无论政治，一些认为保险公司都可以承担PBGC和其他联邦机构不能的一些风险。
The current system of pension protection has its roots在1963年的避难所破产。汽车制造商在南部弯道，印第安纳州的制造厂射击了4,000名工人，并终止了养老金计划。没有国家安全网或养恤金法，工人发现他们还有很少的追索权。关注对养老金的新威胁，然后 - 纽约参议员雅各布杰布斯在1967年举起冠军立法，为退休福利保障，为雇主遭受雇主的灾害而建立联邦保险计划。1974年，国会通过了Erisa，以防止资金处于管理不定;法律规定了养老金计划的最低标准，并为参与者提供了苏的权利，如果他们的福利受到妥协或计划违反他们的信托义务。
As part of ERISA, Congress established the PBGC as the pension provider of last resort. In the four decades since the agency’s creation, the U.S. economy has undergone profound changes that have decimated companies once thought impervious. The PBGC now pays 800,000 retirees each month, and 585,000 more will receive benefits from the agency when they stop working.
在2006, Congress passed the PPA, which was designed to strengthen plans and protect the PBGC, then facing a shortfall. The combination of PPA and new accounting standards required companies to make contributions to troubled plans and to recognize funding gaps, a move that alerted investors to pension plan risk. Two years later companies’ defined benefit portfolios were hit by the financial crisis and plummeting markets. Funding levels at the 100 largest plans dropped by 30 percent, setting the stage for big changes.
Risk transfers have always been allowed under ERISA. Although Prudential this year celebrates the 88th anniversary of its deal with the Cleveland Public Library — with four pensioners still receiving checks from the insurance company — pension risk transfers went largely unnoticed in the U.S. until some megadeals in 2012.
Two of the deals were in the long-troubled auto industry. Both GM and Ford struggled in the years leading up to the financial crisis, in part because of expensive pensions. GM went into bankruptcy in March 2009 and emerged a few months later after a government-backed company hived off the most-profitable assets. Though Ford made it through the downturn without government help, both car companies needed to reduce the risk of their pensions.
福特公司向9万名前带薪员工提供一次性付款in the U.S. Although it had been common for companies to offer lump sums to vested employees who no longer worked for the company, Ford’s offer was the first made to retirees. After Ford contributed $3.4 billion to the plan, the lump-sum offer settled about $18 billion of the company’s $49 billion in U.S. pension liabilities. That same year转基金转入251亿美元的负债审慎by buying a group annuity for 110,000 former salaried employees — the biggest deal of its kind in U.S. history. The company also offered 44,000 of its 118,000 white-collar employees lump sums. Those who declined were added to the group annuity. GM paid Prudential a premium of about $3 billion for the transaction. It’s easy to see the value of the deal to GM, which at the time had $134 billion in global pension obligations.
To cap off 2012, Verizon announced that October that it was buying a group annuity from Prudential representing $7.5 billion for more than 40,000 employees and would make a $2.5 billion contribution to its pension plan. The $7.5 billion equaled roughly a quarter of the company’s then-$30.6 billion in pension liabilities. Verizon’s deal signaled to the market that pension risk transfer deals were attractive even to healthy companies: Unlike GM, Verizon had an A– credit rating.
2012年的交易处理了全面的退休义务形式，定义的福利计划。近几十年来，界定的捐款计划将员工捐赠拯救和投资退休，这在更频繁地比上一代更频繁地改变工作的工人中越来越受欢迎。员工凭借其定义的贡献计划取得了繁重的成功，但该计划是公司的福音，并没有出现在他们的资产负债表上。
Verizon retirees first rang alarm bells shortly before the company’s pension risk transfer deal was finalized. In November 2012 two retirees filed a lawsuit to block the transaction on the grounds that as annuitants they would be protected by insurance regulations, which they said were inferior to the ERISA safety net for their pension. Verizon said in a statement at the time that insurance protections were on par with ERISA and that Prudential was irrevocably committed to make all payments. Verizon retirees also said the move was not in compliance with ERISA’s standard termination procedures and that the company “intends to de-risk or abandon” its pension responsibilities to enhance its credit rating. A district court in Texas allowed the annuity transaction to go forward.
类退休人员跟进行动。一个group, Verizon retirees who were included in the annuity, claimed that they didn’t get adequate notice and that the fiduciaries should have obtained their consent before the annuity was purchased. The other group in the suit — retirees who were left in Verizon’s plan and whose benefits were not transferred to Prudential — claimed, among other things, that the company breached its fiduciary duty when it paid a $1 billion fee to Prudential out of plan assets rather than Verizon’s revenue.
尽管Verizon西装给通知律师,companies were increasingly accumulating evidence for why they should do risk transfers. In the U.S. budget for fiscal year 2017, there is a proposal to raise PBGC premiums. Designed to shore up the agency’s financial health, the proposed fee hikes appear to be encouraging more deals, which in turn may require more fee increases as company plans leave the system. At $42 a participant, the 2012 Prudential deal saved Verizon $1.7 million a year in PBGC fees. Agency chief Reeder thinks companies are blowing fee hikes out of proportion, but he says the uncertainty around them is a factor in companies’ deciding to do a risk transfer.
Companies have had to deal honestly with longer life expectancies, especially for those typically covered by pensions: unionized workers with access to good health care services. Recently updated mortality tables — actuarial expectations buried deep in the paperwork of most pensions — shocked companies with the amount of money needed to fulfill their vows to provide retirement paychecks until death. As it turned out, companies had been underestimating that number by 5 to 8 percentage points.
许多最大的风险转移交易都涉及曾经是美国商业的壮举。Last year department store chain J.C. Penney — hard-hit by the rise of online shopping and a falloff in mall traffic — reduced its liabilities by 25 to 30 percent after it offered lump-sum payments to retirees and purchased a group annuity from Prudential for another part of its retired workforce. Penney’s stock jumped 7 percent the day it announced the deal. After the restructuring the pension plan that remained with the company was overfunded.
去年，一个上诉法院肯定了下级法院解雇了verizon课程的诉讼。对于代表退休人员转移到审慎的小组，法院确定，除其他外，Erisa不需要同意年金购买，并且Verizon没有违反其确保费用合理的责任。在verizon计划中留下的诉讼中的另一个原告 - 被解雇，因为他们没有对他们的养老金造成伤害证明，因此没有站在埃里莎下起诉。PBGC在过去几年中表示，110万退休人员已经破坏。
No one seems to like pensions except pensioners。Admitting a bit of paranoia, BellTel’s Cohen thinks Congress felt so lucky that the PBGC survived 2008 and the financial crisis that it is now deliberately trying to kill the last corporate defined benefit plans. “If GM weren’t bailed out, there would have been no way PBGC could have covered all those pensions,” he says.
Corporate CEOs and capitalism may be the bad guys in this year’s chaotic presidential election, but many companies — even very profitable ones — are legitimately weighed down by pension obligations. GM was a victim of rich retirement benefits it offered decades before the American car industry found itself competing with foreign automakers.
Like many companies contemplating risk transfers, Motorola grew into a U.S. heavyweight over the course of the 20th century. Founded as Galvin Manufacturing Corp. in 1928, the company later adopted the name of its popular car radio and expanded into two-way radios that became icons in World War II. Motorola, whose radio technology relayed the first words from the moon, reached a peak of 150,000 employees in 2000, after multiple acquisitions. By the middle of that decade, the company was having trouble competing in the mobile phone business and activist investor Carl Icahn had started pressing it to split its complex business in half. Motorola Solutions emerged in January 2011 as one of those two companies.
由于摩托罗拉纺出分界，它保留了向前雇员的养老金义务 - 潜在的潜在常见做法是令人惊讶的。2013年公司开始思考风险转移，其养老金计划约为70％。“经营一个数据库计划基本上是关于为人们提供的报酬，”财务主任奥贝特说。“这是风险，从根本上为每个人来说都是一个非克鲁的职能，而是一个保险公司。”
The pension liability was a legacy issue: The participants were almost all retirees and terminated employees — people who had vested benefits but were neither retired nor working for the company. “Most of them were part of businesses that had been sold years ago, and didn’t fully identify with the company,” O’Keef says.
摩托罗拉解决方案与债权人，评级机构，金融和法律顾问，以及GSAM使风险转移发生。与许多这些交易一样，公司就业，雇用顾问确保它没有产生冲突的决定，例如选择最便宜的而不是最好的年金。摩托罗拉解决方案于二零一四年八月发布债券14亿美元，为10亿美元的养老金捐款。它为终止的既定员工提供了一笔兑换的金额 - 20,000岁 - 旋转退休人员进入自己的计划，并为谨慎获胜的年金拍卖。然后将退休人员计划转移到保险公司。
That left Motorola Solutions with a $4.5 billion U.S. pension liability. “In the old world, retirees were participants in a plan that was 70 percent funded and guaranteed by a sponsor with a triple-B rating,” says O’Keef. “Once it was spun off, these retirees were in a fully funded plan with backing by Prudential, which has a double-A-minus rating.”
As O’Keef describes it, turning a pension into an annuity is a huge change. “It’s an extraordinary act in the pension landscape,” he says.
George (Phil) Waldeck, head of the pension and structured solutions business at Prudential Retirement, doesn’t think it’s so extraordinary. “These are mainstream obligations for us,” he says. “In the life insurance business, people die unexpectedly early; insurance companies pool the risk and provide a solution. In the pension annuity business, we make long-dated obligation payments to people. We take the risk of people living longer than expected, but remember, large groups of retirees — we pool the risk from different companies — are very predictable when it comes to longevity.”
Waldeck在2006年在PPA通过时，在2006年建立了养老金风险转移团队。Waldeck在大会上观看了C-Span的Pension Geek，Waldeck预计新法律将加速远离界定的福利养老金，并通过使用责任驱动的投资策略来开始降低计划的风险，关闭和冻结计划，并进行风险转移。他认为谨慎可以帮助他们以成本效益的方式履行义务。“公司如何保留他们向人们制造的承诺用过的为他们工作？“他说。
Waldeck points to the experience of U.K. companies, which confronted similar reforms a few years ago, as proof that pension risk transfers are working and that nothing has gone wrong. “The key is that pension liabilities are getting funded up — companies are plugging deficits — and conservatively matched on insurers’ balance sheets,” he says.
Pension risk transfers will have a mixed effect on the health of the PBGC. Theoretically, the agency is laying off part of its risk every time a company transfers a liability to an insurance company. The PBGC is exposed to plan sponsors with an average of 80 cents for every dollar of liability and a portfolio that is about half in equities, with some alternative investments and corporate bonds. Although the risk transfer deals could reduce the agency’s exposure to corporate America’s pension liabilities, that potential benefit is offset by lost revenue when companies no longer pay premiums.
即使是PBGC的限制，包括一个65岁的退休人员的60,136个年度上限，养老金领取者的最大投诉之一是Belltel的Cohen等养老金领取者的责任是损失原子能机构的保护。
为了缓解退休人员的恐惧，代表所有50个州的保险集团——国家生命健康保险担保协会组织4月发表了第一项研究，将ERISA与国家保护进行比较。在其聘请威利斯·托尔斯·沃森进行审查的诺尔赫报告中指出，与养老金计划及其发起人相比，保险公司必须持有超过负债的资本；当他们进行风险转移交易时，他们有义务吸收比他们承担的负债更大的资产。ERISA不要求养老金计划得到充分的资金。诺尔赫还发现，在金融危机期间或之后，没有任何年金提供者破产，但在2007年至2015年期间，931个单一雇主养老金计划失败。然而，养老金风险转移批评者指出，1991年高管人寿保险公司的失败和2008年美国国际集团的崩溃，证明该行业需要更多的监管。
Former PBGC directorJoshua Gotbaum, who is现在在布鲁金斯机构的经济研究计划中的嘉宾学者, believes annuities are a safe option. To him lump-sum payments are the real risk to retirement security. Corporations are offering them in record numbers because annuities are expensive when interest rates are as low as they are now. Companies can provide lump sums at a big discount to the value of the liability, and they don’t have to disclose the discount. In a2015 PBGC study，2007年至2013年之间的500多个风险转移交易中的近400个是一块钱。“这不是一个购买年份的好时机，但由于税收和埃里萨法规，这是一家公司做一笔钱的好时机，”Gotbaum说。
Robert Rehm, a co-founder of the BellTel association who retired in 1991 after 30 years at NYNEX Corp. and its predecessor companies, says there are many issues he would like to see resolved if the Supreme Court grants the plaintiffs the right to sue Verizon. Among them is the $1 billion fee Verizon paid Prudential for the annuity. Rehm calls it an enticement for the insurer to take the obligations and says it was wrong for Verizon to take it out of the pension plan itself; he thinks it should have come out of corporate operating expenses. “Don’t charge me a billion dollars because you want to shed your pension,” says the Jericho, New York, resident.
Rehm misses Verizon’s published reports on the health of the pension plan, including how much was paid to retirees and spent on administrative costs, and the ability to call someone in Verizon’s human resources department when he has a question. The annuity doesn’t come with any pension increases. Though Verizon hadn’t made any increases for quite some time, the annuity ends any possibility for raises in the future.
For now, the Supreme Court has done nothing with the BellTel retirees’ cert petition. “It hasn’t denied it, hasn’t granted it, hasn’t rescheduled it and hasn’t asked the government’s views,” says Karen Hansdorf, counsel for the petitioner. She says the court may be waiting for a decision on another case —Spokeo Inc.v。Robins，这也涉及原告，这些原告没有遭受具体的伤害。
企业养老金继续缓慢死亡,pension risk transfers are the tombstones. Although the current generation of retirees is likely to get its benefits, everyone else is on their own. “De-risking — it’s a confusing word, a convenient word for corporations,” says Rehm. “Companies are stripping away the pension from their own responsibility. It’s good-bye retiree.” •
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