The past few years for the pension industry have been difficult, to put it mildly. But for the Top 100 pension plans, things are starting to look up. Pension assets have cracked the $800-billion mark for the first time ever and are closing in on $900 billion. Assets climbed nearly 10%, with a number of plans reporting double-digit increases. And there was just one plan that reported a decline in assets, compared with 26 in 2011.
Pension plans have had a trying time over the last few years. Stocks have taken investors for a ride, and a low interest rate environment is the new normal. Following is a review of the themes and issues we’ve covered since 2008 in this web-exclusive article.
Today, most Canadian single employer DB pension plans have large solvency deficits, and there continues to be significant focus on the large minimum contributions required to fund these deficits. What has received little attention in recent years is that there is also a cap, prescribed in the Income Tax Act, on contributions that can be […]
Federal public employees who retire early are eligible to collect a bridge benefit that can be as much as $105,000 per retiree, according to a study.
The Canadian Wheat Board has purchased a $150-million annuity policy from Sun Life Financial that transfers investment and longevity risk from its DB plan to the insurer.
The financial assets of New Brunswick’s public service, teachers’ and judges’ pension plans reached an all-time high of $10.1 billion at the end of March, up from $9.4 billion a year earlier.
Air Canada may get rid of its pension plan deficit, which was $3.7 billion at the end of January, in seven years.
Sustainability is a clichéd, overused word in the DB pension plan arena these days. Sustainability focuses on delivering an appropriate retirement benefit at an acceptable cost. In some ways, sustainability is a way to cloud the real issue: it always seems to come back to affordability.
The solvency position of Canadian pension plans continued to rise in May.
The funded status of the typical U.S. corporate plan increased by 5.6 percentage points in May to 86.4%—the highest level in nearly two years.