California Pension Funds Close To Bankruptcy
Posted Under: Banksters
by Auto on January 30, 2009

The two largest pension funds in California, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS), have lost billions of dollars in value. Hundreds of thousands of retiring state employees and teachers now face the stark choice of accepting much reduced pension checks or working past their retirement age.

CalPERS is the largest pension fund in the US and the fourth largest in the world. At its height in October 2007 it had $260 billion in assets, comparable to the GDP of Poland, Indonesia or Denmark. At the end of 2008 CalPERS was worth $186 billion, one of its worst annual declines since the fund’s inception in 1932. It is one of the latest casualties of the financial collapse on Wall Street.

After years of gambling in real estate investments, the state workers pension fund has lost more than 41 percent of its value, after peaking last fall. Its real estate holdings have dropped from $9 billion to $5.8 billion, according to the Sacramento Bee.

Full Article

Join Our Newsletter

Short Video Series: Understand why the financial crisis is occurring, and how to protect yourself

Buy Gold and Silver Bullion

This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Archived. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.