When is it going to sink in that it's IMPOSSIBLE to do that with large sums of money over the long term without some serious book-cooking.
Remember those pictures of the Great Depression where the soup lines were primarily older men? It's here again. And we were told it was unlikely to happen again because of the supposed safeguards in place. Fuckin' liars and thieves have ruined the USA. They can go straight to hell.
people losing their homes and begging on the streets? there is nothing new under the sun. in fact, hundreds of years ago, President Thomas Jefferson suspected this would happen: "If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them, will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." -Thomas Jefferson the root of all our economic woes is given in the above statement by Jefferson.
Wait until the pensions that are left and rolled over to the individuals start getting creamed also. Most companies with remaining pension plans are rolling them into self directed plans where they are able to drop the pension obligation from their annual budgets. All the people that left their money with the mutual fund industry and ignored it during our last downturns are now going to throw their formerly guarenteed pension money into the same funds. My wife has her 403b in TIAA-CREF and I left it to her to take care of, not that I would have done better, and she is still under water 6% from her all time high. That high was back in June of '07. TIAA-CREF is supposed to be one of the good ones, but couldn't avoid the butt slamming. January 1 of next year she will have her pension money rolled into the same funds. Yippee!
Or else taking on some risk. The idea is to take on only a small risk; one that can be buffered by sovereign income. On average that approach should do well. I very much like the Norwegian model. The problems in US pension funds have arisen because of poorly regulated capitalism spurred on be greed and mismanagement. This should not be an indictment of the basic principles, as the number of pension funds that have remained sound is evidence of that.