Crom’s Crommentary: A Stock-Market Downturn and Its Effects on Pension Plans and Retirement

Live from Music Row Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.

CROM CARMICHAEL:

Mike, I’ve read some stories over the weekend, but there’s one in particular that caught my eye at The Wall Street Journal. The headline: “Buying the Stock-Market Dip Is Backfiring. Investors Keep Piling In Anyway.” And the first sentence is this – “This is the worst year for buying the stock market dip since the 1930s.”

Now the stock market is essentially a prediction market, on the economy. The stock market is always forward-looking. It’s not backward-looking. And if the stock market, which through last week, broke through 30,000, on the downside, the amount of money household wealth has gone down $50 trillion since the Biden administration took office.

But the other thing, another headline that caught my eye is this headline on essentially the same topic.

“Pensions Brace for Private Equity Losses.” So pension plans, which had done very well in the last 15 years, investing in private equity stocks – companies while they were still private, and then they went public and made very large returns – now that’s heading the other way.

Now the losses from private equity are mounting up. And so the pension plans that cover the retirement benefits of mostly government employees and union people in terms of defined benefits, we’re likely to see giant holes in their balance sheets.

And then the question becomes, who fills that hole? Will it be the taxpayers who don’t have a defined benefit plan who the Democrats look to to fill it? It’s an open question, but the fact that these two articles combined, show me – and then there’s one other, and that is about how Biden has been, and we’ve known this, but I didn’t realize the extent to which he’s been robbing the strategic oil reserve. It’s close to 2 million barrels a day and it’s been very consistent.

Our strategic oil reserves are now at an all-time low. And Biden has been robbing the strategic oil reserves to try to drive down the price of oil so that he can claim that energy prices are falling. But that stops at the end of October, which happens to be right before the election.

So what you’re looking at is the stock market that, looking forward, is not predicting that next year will be a good year. And if it continues to fall, then the question of what it does to pension plans becomes a huge issue over the next few years.

Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:

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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.