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Bill Bonner, in his newsletter, Daily Reckoning, writes...

Our old friend, Martin Spring, writes with some thoughts on pensions:

"In America, some large corporations face bankruptcy because of their pension fund liabilities - in the case of General Motors these are three times the value of its shares. Congress is currently hammering out a new law to force companies to fund their pension promises and pay more in premiums to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which has a $23 billion deficit.

"In Britain, companies are being forced to divert cashflow to clear the deficits in their funds within 10 years - the Pensions Regulator has started to use his new power to veto dividend increases.

"But it's a problem that has much wider repercussions. It's starting to embrace all sectors of society and to trigger the first skirmishes in the coming pension wars.

"In the United States, New York City transit authority workers recently went on strike to block a move to increase compulsory pension contributions by new employees from two to six percent.

"In the United Kingdom, a million local government workers went on strike to protest against plans to stop early retirements on full pensions, and the government has been castigated for giving bad advice to 85,000 workers about how secure their pension funds would be - then refusing to compensate them when the funds went bust.

"The scale of the emerging pensions problem is frightening.

"In Europe, the Kok Report recently warned that by mid-century the ratio of pensioners to active workers will double. Broadly speaking, that means the burden on the working population of supporting those who have retired will also double.

"In Britain, 97 of the 100 biggest listed companies have deficits in their pension funds, while the liabilities of unfunded schemes for public-sector employees, if taken into account, would more than double the national debt.

"In America, the gap between the cost of Social Security pensions, Medicare and future tax revenues to pay for them has been estimated at $44 trillion, or four times GDP.

"At the heart of the worsening pensions funding problem in the developed world is refusal to face up to the facts. There won't be a problem in future if it's tackled now, but doing so requires making substantial sacrifices now and for years to come.

"Very few are willing to do that."

No, Martin, few people are willing to do that...not as long as things are going so well.