Because of way too optimistic expected returns, pension funds will not be able to deliver.

Sir, Martin Wolf writes “Pension reform makes sense up to a point” March 11 and I hope he takes the opportunity to also look in at the rates of return of pension funds used in actuarial valuations.

As an Executive Director of the World Bank (2002-2004) I continuously held that “It really is not possible for the value of investment funds to grow, forever, at a higher rate than the underlying economy, unless they are just inflating it with air, or unless they are taking a chunk of the growth from someone else. Therefore when we observe how many Social Security System Reforms are based on the underlying assumption that the average pension fund will obtain returns of 5 to 7 percent, in real terms, forever, I have to wonder when we are going to use our knowledge, and inform the world that this is just plain crazy.”

And even after the crisis, the world mostly uses those overly optimistic expected rates of returns in… what cheats they are!

PS. The extract is from my book Voice and Noise of 2006, one of which I also then gave Martin Wolf. Unfortunately Mr. Wolf must not have read it otherwise he would not have perhaps wasted so much valuable opinion space on his macroeconomic-imbalances explanations for this crisis, and would have understood better and earlier the monstrous regulatory imbalances.

PS. Strangely it seems this article by Martin Wolf has disappeared from the web.