Shell Is Last FTSE 100 Company to Close DB Plan

本月在英国企业生活中看到了一个时代的结束。After decades of sending its employees to the most dangerous corners of the globe in search of oil — with only the thought of their families and the promise of a guaranteed income in their declining years to sustain them — Shell U.K. became the last FTSE 100 company to announce that it was closing its final salary pension scheme to new members. People joining in the future would no longer receive a fixed income based on their pay rate at retirement.

Only days later observers were reminded of why final salary and other defined benefit schemes are on their way out. The Pension Protection Fund, which is charged by the British government with keeping defined benefit schemes sufficiently funded, revealed a record combined shortfall for U.K. schemes of £277 billion at the end of December — more than four times higher than a year before.

Over the past decade U.K. pension funds have been hit first by unfavorable tax changes, then by plunging equity markets and finally by a rise in the value of U.K. government bonds. This has increased the present value of their liabilities, which is calculated using a discount rate based on gilt yields. Many companies have concluded that making up the shortfalls is too costly — leaving closure as the best option.

Shell’s scheme is — in contrast to many — in rude financial health: its last valuation showed a surplus. However, the company said the decision was taken “to reflect market trends in the U.K.”, notably the trend towards closing defined benefit programs to new hires. Shell no longer wanted to be the odd one out.

尽管这一趋势，贝壳和许多其他U.K. Blue Chips仍然面临着对已经在他们关闭之前已经报名的福利计划已经报名的工人的数百磅将来承诺的头痛。

Analysts argue that most pension funds can afford to take a longer view of how to achieve this than many other institutional investors since their liabilities are stretched out over decades. In the aftermath of past recessions, this thought would have provided solace. After a few bumpy years, the world’s different asset classes were prone to return to their normal growth patterns, allowing a pension fund manager to make decent returns from a prudently diversified portfolio if given enough time.

But these days investors find little comfort in the thought that they are making long-term investment decisions. The notion simply multiplies their problems. Fears about future investment returns extend far beyond the next few years because uncertainty about the basic tenets of investing is perhaps the greatest it has been in more than half a century.

For example, it is at first sight tempting to invest for the long term once more in U.K. and other rich-country equities since despite extended periods of bearish performance, over the time span of a generation, stock markets have shown a marked tendency to rise.

However, this strategy assumes that developed countries will sooner or later return to strong economic growth, allowing companies to boost their earnings. Many analysts fear that, to the contrary, huge government and personal debt burdens could create a Japan-style syndrome across the developed world — a full generation of economic stasis.

A superficially attractive solution for U.K. pension funds is to invest heavily instead in emerging equity markets such as China and India, whose economic growth remains rapid despite the rich world’s malaise. However, many years of robust economic growth in China has not yet translated into consistently strong stock market performance. Moreover, the correlation between developed and developing-world equities has actually increased in recent years. In other words, the Chinese and Indian stock markets will, on past form at least, provide no refuge should western stock markets falter — a fact proved by their poor showing at the height of the euro zone crisis last year.

Government bond markets provide no easy alternative for pension funds. The euro zone crisis has left investors with two equally unattractive choices: relatively safe sovereigns, including U.K. gilts, that offer below-inflation yields, or countries offering attractive yields but real chances of default. This situation could continue for many years to come, since it is likely to take more than a decade for many rich countries to return to fiscal stability.

面对这些无益化的命题，养老基金正在寻求新的边界，如基础设施投资。发展中国家将在未来几十年中要求港口，铁路和道路的大规模支出。U.K.财政部长乔治·奥斯本最近宣布计划从养老基金吸引20亿英镑，以改善英国的吱吱作响的基础设施，包括其臭名昭着的钢铁系统。成功的基础设施项目具有强大的现金流量，从半统治权力中源于半统治 - 养老基金特别吸引力，因为它为他们提供了稳定的收入流，以达到每年的负债进入未来的负债。他们还提供低与股票的相关性 - 这一综合思想确实只有四年的股票市场崩溃，并占据了令人惊讶的大量其他资产课程。