There are two sorts of private pension: the savings plan and the salary-linked pension.
BBC: NEWS | Programmes | Working Lunch | Pensions: Past, present and future
So might the government's requirement that private pension-scheme investors get at least a zero return.
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Fixed income holdings by private pension funds are way above trend, near 40 percent of assets.
Similarly, private pensions pay premiums to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which protects private pension beneficiaries.
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That has never been universal, as Argentina's recent nationalisation of private pension funds showed.
And with 17m people already in private pension schemes, small changes can add greatly to costs.
Membership of company and private pension schemes is continuing to decline, figures from the Office for National Statistics show.
In return German workers will receive tax incentives to make up the shortfall by investing in private pension assets.
Shipman, former principle with State Street Global Advisors, perhaps the largest private pension investment management firm in the world.
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The problems besetting private pension funds are also a headache for the government.
The scandal over mis-selling, in addition to raising costs, has made it harder to persuade people to trust a private pension.
Private pension saving has been getting a bad name, as the troubles at Equitable Life follow the scandal of personal pension mis-selling.
Its official: Twenty three billion dollars in private pension funds have been seized by the leftist government of Cristina Kirchner in Argentina.
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Several years ago Argentina nationalized the private pension plans of its populace, and recently Cyprus has been talking about taking similar action.
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Her main effort will be to overhaul Chile's much-hyped private pension system.
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But private pension plans (overseen by the Financial Accounting Standards Board) may not set a liability discount rate based on anticipated asset performance.
That marks a contrast with neighbouring Argentina, whose government has financed an increase in spending by nationalising private pension funds, shredding investor confidence.
The number of private pension plans fell by 75% over the past two decades to 31, 000 and now cover a mere 20% of workers.
In the mid-1980s, about 40% of Australians had a private pension.
The reluctance to save enough in private pension plans is widespread.
The Conservative answer is to offer younger people the opportunity to opt out of the state system, and to build up a fully private pension.
During the administration of George W. Bush, he pushed a plan to allow workers to divert a share of their payroll taxes into private pension schemes.
The near-collapse of the Equitable, once regarded as the best managed private pension company in the UK, has been the longest running financial scandal of the 2000s.
Currently, everybody earning more than a basic income is legally required to make modest payments either towards the State Earnings-Related Pension Scheme or into a private pension.
But the private pension funds are unpopular with the public.
While Labour was quick, after it was elected in 1997, to seize upon the welfare problems presented by an ageing population, its first initiatives focused on private pension provision.
Only about half of the 200 largest public and private pension funds in the US and only some 45 percent of sovereign wealth funds currently invest in PE funds.
He wants to increase Social Security payments to make up for the destruction of private pension plans and expand Medicare with the goal of arriving, eventually, at single-payer health care.
Ros Alton states "if you have a private pension, then you've lost a lot of money" and the programme then goes on to consider the lot of anyone close to retirement.
But it is also true for those with private pension funds: these consist of equities and bonds which depend on workers to generate the income needed to pay dividends and interest.
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