[Marxism] The $4.7 Trillion Pyramid--why Social Security won't be enough to save Wall Street-Harpers Magazine

[Jon Flanders <jonflanders@xxxxxxxxx>]

The $4.7 Trillion Pyramid --
Why Social Security won't be enough to save Wall Street
Posted on Wednesday, May 11, 2005. Originally from April 2005.
By Michael Hudson

[About the Author:  Michael Hudson is Distinguished Professor of Economics
at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and the author of many books on
international and domestic finance, including Super Imperialism: The Origin
and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance.]


"They wanted something for nothing. I gave them nothing for something."

-J. R. "Yellow Kid" Weil


Social Security, formerly the "third rail" of American politics, has now
been trod upon, in rather dramatic fashion, by George W. Bush. Given that
the maneuver is both stupid and unnecessary, one must ask why. After all,
the program's alleged deficiencies, if there are any, will not manifest
themselves until at least 2018. This is not quite the same as worrying about
the sun's eventual collapse into a black hole, but for most politicians a
problem that lies thirteen years in the future is nearly the same thing.
Clearly all is not what it seems.

Bush himself offers two reasons for the present boldness. The first-that
Social Security is "in crisis"-is easily dismissed. Government actuaries,
backed by economists from across the political spectrum, insist there is no
funding problem. The Social Security Administration will take in more money
than it pays out for the next thirteen years; it has built up a reserve of
$1.8 trillion in interest-bearing Treasury bonds for the years after that;
and any later shortfall can be covered easily by even a partial rollback of
the recent tax cuts for the rich.

Bush's second argument sounds more promising. If the American people will
simply follow his plan, he says, they too will become rich.[1]

The way the system works now, the government withholds 12.4 percent of your
paycheck, up to $90,000 in annual income. In return, it promises to provide
you a monthly payment-a pension-from the time you turn sixty-two until the
time you die. As of this writing, the administration's alternative remains
somewhat nebulous, but what is clear in all of the variations presented thus
far is that you will be able to put some of your paycheck into the stock
market. Bush calls these stock purchases "personal savings accounts."

Vice President Dick Cheney described the benefits of these personal savings
accounts in January. His example was a young woman who put away $1,000 every
year for forty years. The Social Security Administration currently puts her
money into Treasury bills, which at present return about 2 percent, so in
forty years that investment would have returned about $61,000. Not too bad.
"But if she invested the money in the stock market," Cheney said, "earning
even its lowest historical rate of return, she would earn more than double
that amount-$160,000. If the individual earned the average historical stock
market rate of return, she would have more than $225,000-or nearly four
times the amount to be expected from Social Security."[2]

That's a lot of math. Cheney's main point is that an upbeat assessment of
the stock market-about 7.5 percent annually over forty years, by his
reckoning-would easily exceed the 2 percent offered by Treasury bills.

There is no arguing that $225,000 is more than $61,000. On the other hand,
it's not as if you get a lump sum from the Social Security Administration
when you retire. The woman Cheney cited could end up taking in much more
than $61,000 if she lives long enough. (The average annual payment to
retirees today is about $11,000.) Or she could die on her sixty-second
birthday. Like any other investment-or any other form of insurance, for that
matter-Social Security is somewhat of a gamble. But then so is the stock
market. By Cheney's estimation, however, today's stock market is a much
better bet. "Over time," he concluded, "the securities markets are the best,
safest way to build substantial personal savings."

That is the argument, anyway. The stock market is the main chance in
America, and Bush wants to let all of us in on the action.

The one sure mark of a con, though, is the promise of free money. In fact,
the only way the stock market is going to grow is if we the people put a lot
more of our money into it. What Bush seeks to manufacture is a boom-or, more
accurately, a bubble-bankrolled by the last safe pile of cash in America
today. His plan is a Ponzi scheme, and in that scheme it is Social Security
that is being played for the last sucker.

* * *

Retirement savings are by far the most important source of money on Wall
Street. The Federal Reserve Board reports that private and public retirement
accounts, not including Social Security, had assets of $10 trillion at the
end of 2003. Nearly half of that, $4.7 trillion, was held in stocks. By way
of comparison, the total value of all domestic stocks listed on NASDAQ, the
American Stock Exchange, and the New York Stock Exchange at the end of 2003
was about $14.2 trillion.

In the past, few retirement dollars found their way to Wall Street. IRAs and
401(k)s had yet to be invented, and few companies offered private pension
plans of any kind. In 1950, General Motors-then, as now, among the largest
employers on earth-began to change that with a new form of compensation. The
company would withhold money from paychecks, much like the Social Security
Administration was doing, and add money of its own to build up a reserve to
pay retirees many decades into the future. Generally called a "defined
benefit" plan, the scheme guaranteed retirees a specific (defined) monthly
payment until they died.

Other giants of American industry soon followed, and the funds grew quickly.
In most of them, at least half the money was put into the stock market.
Workers thus would gain, at least in theory, a stake in the prosperity of
their company, building loyalty to management while also providing companies
with a captive source of credit-their own workforce. All of that new cash
contributed to the bull market of the 1950s.

Management philosopher Peter Drucker called this process "pension-fund
socialism" and hailed it as the most positive social development of the
twentieth century, because it would at last merge the interests of labor and
capital. Louis O. Kelso and Mortimer J. Adler even wrote a book called The
Capitalist Manifesto announcing that a new epoch of harmony between workers
and owners was at hand, because soon all workers would be owners.

It didn't quite work out that way. Many companies used retirement reserves
to buy their own stocks, bidding up their share price and allowing them to
take over other firms on favorable terms, especially as mergers and
acquisitions gained momentum in the 1960s. The problem was that when
companies went bankrupt-especially small firms-the collapse also wiped out
the pension funds invested in those companies. Employees of such companies
found themselves not only out of work but stripped of the money they thought
was being saved up for their retirement.

Congress moved to limit such behavior by obliging corporate pension funds to
be run by arm's-length trustees, although workers were still permitted (and
often encouraged) to keep their pensions in the stock of their employers. To
further protect workers, Congress created the Pension Benefit Guarantee
Corporation (PBGC) in 1974. All corporate pension plans were required to buy
federal insurance, through the PBGC, to protect workers in the event of a
failed investment scheme or corporate bankruptcy. The plans themselves were
still prone to risk, but at least the pensions would be backed by the
government and workers could feel secure about their retirement.[3]

Most companies now offer their employees a broad array of mutual funds
instead of just their own stock. In itself this is good common-sense
investing practice, and it also protects fund managers from charges of
scheming. The other result of this practice is that workers' fortunes are
now tied not just to their own companies but to the market as a whole.

* * *

which is where and how we come to both the problem and the scam. While fears
regarding the solvency of Social Security are unwarranted, many corporate
pension plans-the ones that have been so important in bankrolling the
stock-market rise of the past few decades-are themselves threatening to go
bust, taking their parent companies down with them. The financial rot
already has begun to seep into the airline and steel industries, and the
auto sector may be next. (General Motors reports that its current pension
obligations add $675 to the cost of every vehicle it produces.)

The shortfalls aren't just a matter of bad luck. For quite a few years now,
companies simply haven't been putting away enough money to pay retirees what
they are owed. The PBGC estimates that the underfunding of traditional
defined-benefit plans, for instance, deepened by $100 billion last year, to
a total of $450 billion.

The problem was created by fund managers and CFOs who believed-or at least
pretended to believe-that pension reserves could grow at fantastic rates of
return forever. Milliman USA, a benefits consulting firm, reports on the
assumed rates of return on pension investments at the hundred largest firms
in America. How high did these companies bet? In 2000 and 2001, the median
projected rate of return was 9.5 percent. In 2002 it was 9.25 percent. And
in 2003 it was 8.55 percent.

These are wildly optimistic projections, even by Dick Cheney's standards.
Last summer the Financial Times noted that they conflict not only with
present reality but with warnings from such mainstream investment experts as
Peter Bernstein, Jeremy Siegel, and Jeremy Grantham that "we have entered a
low-return environment" and that as a result many investors are expecting
long-term returns closer to 7 percent or 5 percent. Even these rates seem
overly exuberant, given that the top hundred corporate pension funds earned
an average annual investment return of just 1.3 percent between the end of
1999 and the end of 2003.[4]

At the beginning of 2001, for instance, IBM proposed that it would earn $6.3
billion on pension-fund assets of $61 billion-about 10 percent. This was an
astonishing demonstration of confidence given that IBM had earned only $1.2
billion on those assets the previous year. In the event, IBM actually went
on to lose $4 billion in 2001. Barely daunted, the company's managers
predicted a 9.5 percent return in 2002. They lost another $7 billion. In
2003 they predicted a return of $6 billion, and-as the market began to
recover-they at last beat their prediction, by $4.4 billion. The result of
this "recovery" is that, since George W. Bush took office, IBM's
pension-fund assets have plummeted by more than $1 billion. Nonetheless,
corporate fund managers across America remain optimistic.

Such errors in judgment are seldom accidental. In pretending that their
funds could generate high returns, managers sought a real-albeit
short-term-advantage. The faster companies projected their funds to grow,
the less they had to set aside to pay their retirees. The lower set-asides
in turn allowed them to report higher earnings, thereby driving up the price
of the company's own stock to "create shareholder value." Faced with a
choice between living up to their pension promises or reporting higher net
earnings, companies simply decided not to live up to their employee
agreements.[5]

The practice is not one that can be sustained across forty years. It is a
kind of Ponzi scheme, in which present profits are paid for by the promise
of future stock-market gains. At some point retirees are going to want the
money they are owed. The last few years have seen the results of these
broken promises in the form of lawsuits, bankruptcy, and, ultimately,
retirees being forced to live on far less than they were promised.

In the end, it is the PBGC that pays when the plans go bust. Here, however,
the problem deepens considerably, because picking up the total bill for the
corporate sector's underfunding would bankrupt the PBGC itself.

Last November the PBGC reported that although it had "operated for several
years with virtually no claims," the end of the stock-market boom has given
way to "a period of record-breaking claims." As recently as 2001, the PBGC
had a surplus of $8 billion, but a series of bankruptcy cases pushed it $23
billion into deficit last year, a year in which it took in only $1.5 billion
in premiums. The PBGC would need more than fifteen years just to make up its
current deficit, with new claims arriving all the while. The PBGC has
proposed that companies follow more realistic accounting rules and pay
premiums that reflect the true risks of their underfunding. It also is
asking for stricter limits on the ability of companies to escape their
pension debts by declaring bankruptcy.[6]

Without such changes the PBGC will be forced into bankruptcy and the
government will have to bail it out. That could cost as much as $95 billion,
according to the Congressional Research Service. At that point only today's
profits would remain private. The losses will have been fully socialized.[7]

* * *

Barring some sudden influx of capital, something has to give-either the
hopes of retirees or the hopes of the stock market. Unfortunately, this is a
zero-sum game in which many Americans are on both sides at once. Higher
pension set-asides will diminish corporate earnings. Lowered earnings in
turn will lead to dividend cuts and job losses. Low dividends and high
employment will decrease the demand for stocks-leading to further declines
in the ability of pension funds to pay retirees, with more defaults all
around. Workers, retirees, investors, and taxpayers thus find themselves
yoked to the fortunes of the financial managers who created this situation.

This is hardly the kind of happy pension-fund socialism that Peter Drucker
had in mind, in which worker-owners share risks and rewards alike as they
create the goods and services demanded by a thriving marketplace. In fact,
what has happened is that companies have made a great effort not merely to
share the risk but to off-load it entirely onto the backs of their
employees, the government, and taxpayers in general.

This phenomenon of risk rolling downward can be seen most clearly in the
move by many companies from defined-benefit programs-in which employees are
guaranteed a specific retirement payment, based on their salary history-to
"defined-contribution plans," in which workers know nothing else except how
much is being deducted from their paychecks. The payout rate is decided by
how well the stock market performs, which shifts the risk onto employees
even as it frees up more revenue for their employers and generates rich
commissions for money managers. The risk flows down the economic scale even
as the cash flows up.

Given the widespread problems confronting pensions outside the embrace of
the federal government, now would seem an odd time for the administration to
campaign for Social Security privatization. Why would anyone want to invest
America's last line of pension defense in so perilous a market? Are Bush and
his advisers unaware of the odds?

Probably not. Therefore, they must have a particular idea in mind.
Presumably they believe that some kind of market recovery is needed not only
to rescue the PBGC but to rescue the pension funds, to rescue the stock
market, and, for that matter, to rescue the political fortunes of the ruling
party-that what is needed, in fact, is a Bush boom. After all, such a boom
would allow us to "grow our way out of trouble," as we have done so many
times before.

But where will the funds come from to bid up stock prices? The national
savings rate is nearly zero, because most personal discretionary income-like
that of most companies-is absorbed in repaying debts. Previously, the Fed
could have flooded the capital markets with credit to lower interest rates
and thereby spur a bond and stock-market bubble. But interest rates are at
their lowest since the 1950s. They can go no lower.[8]

There is only one other place to turn. The new flow of funds into the stock
market will have to come from labor itself, just as it did back in the
1950s. Social Security is the greatest plum of all, so large as to virtually
guarantee a boom.

* * *

Talk of bubbles has become popular in recent years, but most discussions
miss the key point. Although optimism is inherent in the human spirit, it
rarely effloresces into the kind of frenzy necessary to float a bubble
without help from the government. In fact, many of history's most famous
bubbles have been sponsored by governments in order to get out of debt.
Britain, in 1711, persuaded bondholders to swap their bonds for stocks in
the South Sea Company, which was expected to get rich off the growth
industry of its day, the African slave trade. By the time the South Sea
bubble collapsed, the government had indeed paid off its war debt-and
speculators were left holding worthless "growth sector" stocks. In 1716,
John Law organized France's Mississippi bubble along the same lines,
retiring France's public debt by selling shares to create slave-stocked
plantations in the Louisiana territories. It worked, for a while.

The U.S. government is now attempting to run the same kind of scam. Bush
would like to persuade Social Security claimants to exchange the security of
U.S. Treasury bonds for a chance to buy growth stocks on which a much higher
return is hoped for. No modern blue-sky venture comparable to the South Sea
or Mississippi companies is needed. The stock market itself has become a
bubble, borne aloft from the burden of generating actual goods and services
by a constant flow of new retirement dollars.

There is no denying that channeling trillions of Social Security dollars
into the stock market would produce short-term gains. But once this money is
spent, the markets are likely to retreat. That is what happens after a
financial bubble. Then we will be right back where we are today, only much
the poorer and with no guaranteed pension system for elderly Americans-who
will, of course, need guaranteed pensions more than ever as they watch their
stock holdings continue to shed value. Indeed, many other countries are just
now recovering from their own dismal experiences with what Augusto Pinochet
and Margaret Thatcher called "labor capitalism" and Bush calls, with no
apparent irony, an "ownership society."[9]

In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes urged governments to run budget deficits
in order to increase the economy's spending power on goods and services. His
point of reference was the "real economy"-the economy of production and
consumption, of investment in capital and in the labor to operate that
capital. Whereas Keynes spoke of governments priming the pump with public
spending programs to get domestic investment and employment going, Bush now
seeks to prime the stock-market pump with Social Security contributions.[10]
It is the next natural step from our real economy to the economy of dreams.


Notes
1. Bush's opponents note a possible third reason, which is that he is hoping
to roll back the New Deal in favor of smaller government. It may be true
that Bush dislikes the New Deal, but it is hard to envision his proposed
replacement as a small-government alternative. A federally mandated transfer
of funds--whether it is from taxpayer pockets to Treasury bills, as with
Social Security, or from taxpayer pockets to the stock market, as under
Bush's proposed changes--is still a federally mandated transfer of funds.
[Back]

2. Any relationship between the solvency of Social Security and the prospect
of these personal accounts is purely rhetorical. Just before Bush's State of
the Union address a reporter asked a "senior administration official" at a
background briefing whether it was accurate to say that personal savings
accounts themselves would have "no effect whatsoever on the solvency issue."
The surprisingly candid response was, yes--"that's a fair inference." [Back]

3. Although as former employees of Enron and WorldCom recently learned, the
price of demonstrating loyalty still can be quite steep. [Back]

4. A three-year Treasury bill purchased at the end of 1999 would have
returned 6 percent. [Back]

5. Plans with more realistic projected rates were deemed "overfunded" and
emptied out. [Back]

6. Reasonable as these requests seem, they are being opposed by the same
corporate managers who created the mess in the first place. Last year the
American Benefits Council, the lobbying organization of pension-fund
managers, persuaded regulators to even further loosen the requirement that
companies estimate realistic rates of return. [Back]

7. That estimate is probably low. The precedent is the bailout of the
Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, which ended up costing
taxpayers $200 billion. [Back]

8. After World War II interest rates rose to a peak, in 1980, of more than
21 percent. The result was nearly four decades of capital losses on
bonds--whose interest rates are fixed at the time you buy them--and a steady
rise in stocks. Since 1980, however, interest rates have fallen back,
creating the greatest bond-market boom in history. [Back]

9. In Chile conglomerates invested employee paycheck withholding in their
own stocks or in loans to affiliates whose value then was wiped out in
financially engineered bankruptcies. The problem got so bad by 1980 that the
government turned over management to American and other international firms.
Most discussions of Chile's "success story" choose to start at the trough
right after these fraudulent bankruptcies, which of course gives a steep
trough-to-peak tilt for the rate of return that is claimed to be normal. The
equivalent for America would be to start a new trend right after a 1929-type
stock-market crash. When one starts from a peak, such as today, it is much
harder to give the statistical impression that a fantastic takeoff is in
store. [Back]

10. The genius of recent administrations, Democratic and Republican, has
been to transfer inflation to the stock market--that is, to the prices of
stocks and bonds instead of to the prices of labor and production. Real
wages today are lower than they were in 1964. [Back]

This is The $4.7 Trillion Pyramid, a feature, originally from April 2005,
published Wednesday, May 11, 2005. It is part of Features, which is part of
Harpers.org.



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