Saving the Western Pension Funds

The following commentary comes from an independent investor or market observer as part of TheStreet's guest contributor program, which is separate from the company's news coverage.

This is the second of the two parts

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- In the first part to this commentary, I pointed out to readers that the current "Western pension crisis" threatening the economies of the Western industrialized world has two primary drivers.

First, with nearly one-fourth of the GDP of these various economies consumed in paying interest (in one form or another), these economies can never generate the same average level of return we experienced when our economies were in relative health. Greatly exacerbating this problem is the propensity for pension fund managers to buy the worst investments in the marketplace.

As I previously explained, most of the blame for this second problem lies in the fact that these pension fund administrators have allowed their decisions to be "heavily influenced" by multinational bankers.

Obviously the first step back on the long, painful road towards solvency for these pension funds is to totally divorce these funds from any connection to these bankers. Don't buy any shares in the bankers' hopelessly insolvent operations. Don't buy any of their fraud-saturated "financial products," and don't listen to anything they say about markets or the economy -- since the percentage of time these banksters are either wrong or simply lying exceeds any accurate information they distribute by at least a factor of ten.

There is another more fundamental problem here, however, which I refer to as "other peoples' money syndrome". This is a very common, human failure where otherwise responsible individuals will show markedly less concern and diligence when handling other peoples' money than when handling their own.

While this syndrome occurs in nothing less than "epidemic" proportions in the world of investment management, it is also rampant in any other context where people are put in charge of other peoples' money. Labor negotiations used to be another prime example. Back when we had actual "equilibrium" in our labor markets (i.e. before our governments allowed massive, structural unemployment to take root); in contract negotiations labor would kick the crap out of management time after time after time.

This problem reached its peak in the 1970's when unions had the audacity to demand that management raise their wages as fast as the bankers were destroying their purchasing power with their rampant currency-dilution (i.e. inflation) -- and were successful in doing so. The "solution" to this problem in the eyes of North American governments was a 40-year "genocide" campaign against unions, while allowing structural unemployment to get so bad that tens of millions of North Americans are no longer allowed to work. It was only when the deck was hopelessly "stacked" against labor that management was able to hold its own in negotiations.

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