It’s nice to see mainstream media highlighting an issue that I’ve been hammering here at Bacon’s Rebellion for a couple of years now. A front-page Wall Street Journal article discusses how the zero-interest rate policies of central banks around the world are crippling returns on pension portfolios, making it difficult for nations and municipalities to meet their obligations.

Among the numbers cited in the article… Global pensions on average put roughly 30% of their assets in bonds. Investment-grade bonds that once yielded 7.5% a year now deliver almost no income at all. Low rates helped pull down assets of the world’s 300 largest pension funds by $530 billion in 2015.

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CALPERS) posted a 0.6% return in fiscal 2016. Its investment consultant, reports the Journal, recently estimated that annual returns will be closer to 6% over the next decade, shy of its 7.5% annual target.

If CALPERS is ready to admit that investment returns will remain depressed over the decade ahead, maybe it’s time for the Virginia Retirement System to do the same. The VRS assumes a 7% annual return on its portfolio — not as divorced from reality as many states, but significantly more than justified by bond returns. The problem, of course, is that acknowledging reality will expand Virginia’s public pension unfunded liabilities by billions of dollars — and nobody knows where the money will come from. So, we’ll pretend the problem doesn’t exist… until it becomes a crisis.