Italy's failed experiment with privatizing the national pension

It looks like this is the only bullet we dodged from the Bush Presidency.

Italy did for retirement financing what President George W. Bush couldn’t do in the U.S.: It privatized part of its social security system. The timing couldn’t have been worse.

The global market meltdown has created losses for those who agreed to shift their contributions from a government severance payment plan to private funds meant to yield higher returns. Anger is rising both at the state, which promoted the change, and money managers such as UniCredit SpA and Arca Previdenza, which stood to profit.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s administration is now considering ways to compensate as many as 1.2 million people who made the switch, giving up a fixed return for private plans linked to financial markets. It’s also letting people delay redemptions on retirement funds to avoid losses after Italy’s benchmark stock index fell 50 percent in 2008, destroying 300 billion euros ($423 billion) in wealth.

“The reform didn’t help anyone,” said Gabriele Fava, who heads the Fava & Associati law firm in Milan and writes about labor law. “Not the government, which was hoping everyone would make the switch to take the strain off its coffers, nor the workers who have not resolved the problem of needing a supplement to their social security pensions.”

Italy’s experience shows how difficult it is to solve a problem facing governments from the U.S. to Europe to Japan as populations age and the old system of taxing workers to support retirees becomes unsustainable. Bush failed to persuade Congress to let workers put a portion of their Social Security taxes into privately invested accounts as voter opposition increased.

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Bullets & Private Retirement in the U.S.

yeah, but we're littered with holes anyway from the other bullets we might just be dead.

As it is they privatized U.S. retirement by denying pensions, now routinely practicing age discrimination and firing people when they turn 50 at the olders, in tech, it can be as young as 30 (yes unreal but true!), then no 401k matching funds even, never mind a damn investment account, called a 401k is simply not a retirement plan.

Pensions are now non-existent and the generation who have been denied retirement benefits....have yet to retire.

Talk about the ultimate financial tsunami that will happen, I think this one is it.