The Sleeping Giant - The Gormogons

‘Puter hates hisself pension funds and gubbamint trying to manage money, even taken one at a time. Putting them together in one place is like pouring gasoline on a fire: it looks cool from a distance, but you don’t want to be anywhere near it when it goes down. And that’s what happens when you have governments managing pension funds: catastrophic results. Aside from the gubbamints’ usual problem of playing politics with pension money rather than soundly investing it (see, e.g., divest from Israel movements), it turns out we now have to worry about the boneheads exaggerating the funds’ projected returns, creating a significant undisclosed future liability.

Publicly funded pension funds are the ticking time bomb no one wants to discuss. GM’s pension fund shortfalls have brought it to the brink of bankruptcy (along with current oil prices). Cobb County, Georgia’s pension fund is about 40% underfunded. Vallejo, California recently filed a Chapter 9 bankruptcy, seeking relief from its pension obligations, which obligations were bankrupting the town. Vallejo’s ever helpful union refused to negotiate the issue.

New accounting rules (GASB 45) are requiring public entities to book the current value of the future cost of other post employment benefits (OPEBs) such as health care, which figure is staggering. Now, actuarial rules are going to require public entities to project rates of return according to the same restrictions placed on private firms, rather than the pie-in-the-sky returns pension managers had been plugging into their calculations. Under the new actuarial rules, approximately 40% of public pension funds are underfunded.

And guess who’s on the hook for this shortfall? That’s right. ‘Puter and you, the little guy taxpayers. So, after we get done paying for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, remain bent over, because you’ll be paying for governments absolute mismanagement of its pension funds. The good to come out of this? Perhaps a wave of municipal bankruptcies will focus voters’ minds on electing sound fiscal managers.

Sleep well, little ones.

'Puter

Always right, unless he isn’t, the infallible Ghettoputer F. X. Gormogons claims to be an in-law of the Volgi, although no one really believes this.

’Puter carefully follows economic and financial trends, legal affairs, and serves as the Gormogons’ financial and legal advisor. He successfully defended us against a lawsuit from a liquor distributor worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid deliveries of bootleg shandies.

The Geep has an IQ so high it is untestable and attempts to measure it have resulted in dangerously unstable results as well as injuries to researchers. Coincidentally, he publishes intelligence tests as a side gig.

His sarcasm is so highly developed it borders on the psychic, and he is often able to insult a person even before meeting them. ’Puter enjoys hunting small game with 000 slugs and punt guns, correcting homilies in real time at Mass, and undermining unions. ’Puter likes to wear a hockey mask and carry an axe into public campgrounds, where he bursts into people’s tents and screams. As you might expect, he has been shot several times but remains completely undeterred.

He assures us that his obsessive fawning over news stories involving women teachers sleeping with young students is not Freudian in any way, although he admits something similar once happened to him. Uniquely, ’Puter is unable to speak, read, or write Russian, but he is able to sing it fluently.

Geep joined the order in the mid-1980s. He arrived at the Castle door with dozens of steamer trunks and an inarticulate hissing creature of astonishingly low intelligence he calls “Sleestak.” Ghettoputer appears to make his wishes known to Sleestak, although no one is sure whether this is the result of complex sign language, expert body posture reading, or simply beating Sleestak with a rubber mallet.

‘Puter suggests the Czar suck it.