Leo Kolivakis's blog

In the fantasy world of right-wing commentators, a bloated public sector has saddled the taxpayer with a £1tn liability for lavish pension payouts for town hall pen-pushers...

Nonunion Georgia’s public pensions are, in fact, three times as generous as those of labor-friendly Vermont, where more than half the public work force has collective bargaining...

The Dutch are not afraid to tackle the big issues. Take the pension system reform agenda as an example. The social partners – employers and employees – are now discussing fundamental issues about the future of the system with a view to designing a new pension contract, including balancing the nominal guarantee and the indexation ambition; longevity risk; and even whether the mandatory system still fits.

Traditional pensions have been vanishing for private sector workers, causing untold retirement anxiety, and American workers want them back...

Funding for U.S. state pension plans improved marginally in 2010 as the economy recovered from the recession, a report from Wilshire Associates said. Will battered plans continue doing better?

Some Sunday food for thought on state budgets, education and jobs...

Former hedge fund analyst Danielle Chiesi compared insider dealing to an orgasm. If that's true, then Wall Street must be experiencing one giant orgasm...

"Public pensions may be attracting the headlines, but the unraveling of private-sector pension security poses a much greater long-term challenge, even if it lacks a pyrotechnic confrontation to galvanize the media."

Bill Gates will step into the national debate over state budgets Thursday with a call for states to rethink their public-employee benefits systems, which he says stifle funding for the nation's public schools.

Facing budget crunches, some states are looking to scrap defined-benefit plans and replace them with defined-contribution plans. But they're only making the problem worse...

The Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS) has posted a 12% rate of return for 2010, up from 10.6% in 2009. But its funding deficit has tripled to $4.5-billion as its pension benefit obligations have increased.

The confrontations in Wisconsin and other states are the opening salvo of a political blame game -- who is responsible for the gigantic public pension fund deficits that threaten states' solvency and workers' retirement savings?

A new report from the Little Hoover Commission says that many state and local government employees have been promised pensions that the public couldn't have afforded even had there been no housing and financial crash. The report doesn't mince words: "pension costs will crush government".

The Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, Canada's largest public pension fund, posted a solid 13.6% return on its investments last year, solidifying its ongoing recovery from a disastrous 2008 loss.

When Takahiro Mitani, Chairman of Japan's $1.4 trillion Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF) expresses concern over his country's mounting public debt, you'd better pay attention...