“The pension funds are collectively in a state of crisis. I’m in Illinois, which is the ground zero – ranking dead last among all 50 states in terms of its public finances. It’s because of the public employee pension funds. I was talking to a group of experts on this, and they were talking about which of the big state pension funds is likely to go bankrupt first. They said, “The one that is actually in the worst shape in Chicago is the police fund. They have $1.3 billion in assets and $8 billion in liabilities, except that the $8 billion in liabilities assume a very high interest rate of return.” They said that that is one that is likely to go bankrupt, but the teachers funds are the basic ones that have Illinois about $100 billion in underfunding of their public plan. So this is something that is going to be spread right across the nation. I believe it will become the biggest issue for the next Administration of this country, assuming that it doesn’t get involved in any terrible wars and we don’t actually have Iran getting a nuclear weapon or something transcendental like that.” ~Don Coxe, Solari Report, March 2016
By Catherine Austin Fitts
As described in the quote above, Don Coxe nailed one of the most important issues in 2017 on our Solari Report interview earlier this year.
The stock market is rising. Oil prices are finally above water as a result of Russia joining into the OPEC deal. The dollar is rising. The new US President Elect is pushing growth at every turn – except on Boeing government contract margins.
At the same time, the Dallas Police and Fire Pension Fund froze withdrawals last week.
One another note the Michigan recount is over. A group of Michigan legislators were proposing a retroactive billing of the full price to Jill Stein’s recount effort. In a state where the Detroit pension funds are cutting benefits and Flint needs millions to build a new water system, it is hard to spend millions of precious taxpayers dollars on a recount at the request of a politician whose financial statement shows that she and her husband enjoy $8.5 million in personal retirement savings.
Welcome to a world where all money is real and the cost of borrowing is rising.
Here are the Thursday close charts –Set One, Set Two, Set Three, Set Four
