“The pension time bomb is ticking — and could ultimately explode in a savings-and-loan-like crisis. An aging workforce and the collapse of the stock market have combined to create massive underfunding of traditional corporate pensions. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), the government agency that insures these pensions, estimates the underfunding at $300 billion, a total that was only $23 billion as recently as 1999,” writes Robert Samuelson in the Washington Post.
