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The Treasury Department on Friday rejected an effort by the Teamsters Central States Pension Plan to cut benefits for 270,000 retired workers starting in July. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said in a letter to members of Congress that while the decision blocks the pending pension cuts, it does not resolve the issue because the pension plan remains severely underfunded and is projected to become insolvent within the next 10 years. …

HER silver tongue honed by decades in corporate marketing, Carly Fiorina has used two debates, and a steely determination on the campaign trail, to climb near the top of the polls for the Republican nomination. But Americans should pause on her biggest professional credential for our highest office: a short, disastrous stint atop one of America’s iconic technology companies, Hewlett-Packard. The clearest measure of her performance — and the report card preferred by Wall Street — is H.P.’s stock price, which dropped by 52 percent during her tenure of almost six years. Yes, Mrs. Fiorina served during the worst fall...

This is the first of a two-part series on the Central States pension fund. The second part looks more closely into why its investment performance suffered. Real estate investments in Las Vegas casinos and hotels once threatened the integrity of a Teamsters pension fund that the federal government wrested away from corrupt trustees and organized crime after five years of legal battles. A quarter-century later, the professionals who replaced them—Central States Pension Fund administrators; the Goldman Sachs & Co. and Northern Trust Global Advisors fiduciaries; and Department of Labor regulators—stood watch while the financial markets accomplished what the mob had...

Almost 55 months after confessing felonious conduct, Teamster money-laundering scandal figure, Jere Nash, has finally been sentenced. U.S. Dist. Judge Thomas P. Griesa (S.D.N.Y., Nixon) sentenced Nash Apr. 9 to a mere two years probation for his role in a series of schemes which lead to the embezzlement of some $885,000 from the Int'l Bhd. of Teamsters' treasury and to $538,100 in illegal campaign contributions to the failed reelection campaign of expelled IBT president Ron Carey. The sentencing appears to have been hush hush: the four N.Y.C. major dailies and the two Washington, D.C., dailies apparently did not cover the...

Chicago homeowners should brace themselves for sticker shock when they open their mailbox at the end of the month: property tax bills on average 13 percent higher than last year. The big increase is mostly being driven by the record tax increase Mayor Rahm Emanuel engineered last fall to fix city pension funds for police officers and firefighters. Cook County Clerk David Orr released tax rate figures Monday, revealing the practical effects of City Hall's painful decision. The owner of a single-family home with the current average sale price of about $225,000 can expect to see a property tax bill...

More than a quarter of a million truckers, retirees and their families could soon see their pension benefits severely cut — even though their pension fund is still years away from running out of money. Within the next few weeks, the Treasury Department is expected to announce a crucial decision on whether it will approve reductions to one of the country’s largest multi-employer pension plans. The potential cuts are possible under legislation passed by Congress in 2014 that for the first time allowed financially distressed multi-employer plans to reduce benefits for retirees if it would improve the solvency of the...

Dale Dorsey isn't happy.After working 33 years, he's facing a 55% cut to his pension benefits, a blow which he says will "cripple" his family and imperil the livelihood of his two children, one of whom is in the fourth grade and one of whom is just entering high school.Dorsey attended a town hall meeting in Kansas City on Tuesday where retirees turned out for a discussion on "massive" pension cuts proposed by the Central States Pension Fund, which covers 400,000 participants, and which will almost certainly go broke within the next decade."A controversial 2014 law allowed the pension...

Last month the Obama administration's Labor Department issued Interpretive Bulletin 2015-01, which tells pension funds what factors to use when choosing investments, including climate change. Only a few tax lawyers noticed, but with U.S. pensions at $9 trillion, this is a gross power grab that will hurt the retirees it claims to protect. This government is essentially saying: Don't you dare invest in anything that causes or is hurt by climate change, or you'll be sued for failing your fiduciary responsibilities. Energy, utilities and industrials are 20% of the market. How can pension funds now own any of them? Pushing...

No wonder Tom Minerath is angry. Sixty-eight years old and retired since 2007, the Town of Merton man is about to have about $20,000 taken away from his annual pension — money he earned, money that was promised him, money guaranteed in contracts negotiated by one of the country's strongest labor unions. "I'm going to make it through this, but it's just not right," he said. "It's just not right." Which probably sums up the feelings of more than 270,000 people, including thousands in Wisconsin, who have been told by the financially troubled Central States Pension Fund that their pension...

Some 407,000 Teamsters are learning a painful lesson: Their private-sector pensions aren’t as safe as they once thought. Pay attention, government workers — and taxpayers — in New York and New Jersey. Last week, letters informed these Teamsters they’re facing cuts in benefits of up to 60 percent. Why? Because their pension fund is going broke. The Central States Pension Fund covers workers from more than 1,500 trucking, construction and other companies in 37 states. Thanks to trucking deregulation, declining union rolls, aging workers and weak stock-market returns, the fund is now paying out $3.46 in benefits for every $1...

Presidential candidate Donald Trump is now taking on one-time Obama "car czar" Steve Rattner.On Monday, Trump fired off a tweet telling Rattner: "I think you should have gone to prison for what you did, I guess Obama saved you." He ended the tweet telling Rattner to watch: "I will win!" It was unclear what activity Trump was referring to that should have landed Rattner in jail. Trump did not respond to CNNMoney's request for comment. In 2010, Rattner did pay $10 million in fines when he settled with the New York state attorney general for his alleged involvement in a...

A decade ago, many of California's public pension plans had plenty of money to pay for workers' retirements. All that has changed, according to a far-reaching package of data from the state controller. Taxpayers are now on the hook for billions of dollars more to cover the future retirements of public workers, with the bill widely varying depending on where they live. The City of Los Angeles Fire and Police Pension System, for instance, had more than enough funds in 2003 to cover its estimated future bill for workers' retirement checks. A decade later, it is short $3 billion. The...

the 25 biggest systems by assets averaged a 7.45% return from 2004 to 2013, but liabilities tripled over the same period leaving them facing a $2 trillion shortfall as investment returns can’t keep up with ballooning obligations. The top 25 funds account for 40% of the entire US public pension system with Illinois, Kentucky, Connecticut, and Louisiana at the top of the 'most underfunded' list. .... the New York-based credit rater’s calculation of liabilities tripled in the eight years through 2012, ... liabilities are crowding out spending for services, roads and schools.

It’s not just fat cat hedge funds, banks or Wall Street investment companies that benefit when U.S. companies cut their tax bills by moving their headquarters overseas via mergers with foreign concerns. More than a dozen state government pension funds that run retirement accounts for government workers like teachers, cops and firemen own big chunks in these “corporate deserters,” too. Five U.S. companies merging with overseas concerns have big state government pension investments amounting to nearly $2 billion, based on data provided by Richard Peterson, senior director at S&P Capital IQ. But you don’t hear about government pension investments in...

Congressman told FBI he asked for -- and got -- free home upgrades ### Convicted political fixer Tony Rezko gave U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez free upgrades on a riverfront town house after the congressman asked for them, Gutierrez told the FBI, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned. Gutierrez's comments to federal agents in a previously undisclosed 2008 interview contradict what the congressman told the Sun-Times in 2006 about the purchase. "I walked in with my wife -- as any other consumer could have -- and purchased the unit at the listed price, with no considerations," the Northwest Side congressman said then,...

Unfunded state and city pension liability has been isolated by many analysts as the next big crisis on the horizon. But it looms in relative silence, largely because Americans simply do not want to talk about it. Let's be honest; it's not exactly dinner table conversation. Many Americans have family and friends that work in public jobs and many of them expect a considerable pension that could be compromised if the system is altered. So the issue is far too personal for public pensioners to embrace any logic that could suggest the system is flawed, while non-pensioners usually want to...

The first total municipal pension default happened last week: Prichard, Ala. ran out of money stopped mailing pension checks. Hundreds of cities could be right behind. Projections by Robert Novy-Marx and Joshua Rauh [PDF] show the average city has $15,000 per household in unfunded pension liabilities. These massive liabilities are ignored by common government accounting (see chart). Insolvency means benefit cuts or borrowing from the already-near-broke states. Many of the 77 cities surveyed by Novy-Marx and Rauh are facing insolvency within the next decade. Other small cities like Prichard could go even sooner.

LA PAZ, Bolivia Bucking a global trend, leftist-led Bolivia is lowering its retirement age and nationalizing its pension funds. Bolivia's Congress approved legislation early Friday to make Bolivians eligible for full pensions at age 58. The country's 70,000 miners will get to retire two years earlier. The previous retirement age was 65 for men and 60 for women. Bolivia's decision to lower its retirement age runs counter to a global trend to raise retirement ages as life expectancies rise, birth rates drop and national treasuries come under strain from pension obligations. France raised its minimum retirement age to 62 last...

BRISTOL — America’s most popular radio talk show host, Rush Limbaugh, blasted Bristol the other day for supposedly making off with some of the $3.3 trillion in loans given to businesses by the Federal Reserve during the recession. While the charge is false – even absurd given the city’s paltry place in the financial arena – Limbaugh didn’t stop there. He described Bristol to his millions of listeners as nothing more than ESPN. “That’s all that’s there: ESPN and a couple of cheap hotels,” Limbaugh said on his nationally syndicated show Thursday. That was more than enough to stir Bristol’s...

In its struggles to deliver balanced state budgets over the past 10 years, Colorado has amassed $3.7 billion in obligations that it may never pay. That sum includes severance taxes taken from municipalities, funds collected for such state services as tourism promotion and waste tire cleanup that were never delivered, prison and school bus costs that were never paid for, and other accounting tricks. State budget analysts told the Legislature's Joint Budget Committee in November that the 2011-2012 budget, with an anticipated $1.1 billion shortfall, no longer includes the $3.7 billion cut over the years. The amounts were included in...