It’s a gray and very November day here in Chicago. It’s snowing. On the 16th of November. It’s pretty chilly and, since my thermostat is reading 59°F, I’m thinking about turning on the heat for the first time this season.
It’s pretty gray and November in the blogosphere as well. I don’t know whether it’s because it’s a slow news day, because a number of key bloggers are off for the kick-off of Open Source nee PJ Media (or whatever they’re calling it now), because I’m not interested in Plamegate, or just my own interior state but the blogosphere is incredibly dull today. Has anyone else noticed it or is it just me?
Dean is blogging about catsup again. Donald Sensing has a post on political posturing among Democratic senators over at Winds of Change (I covered that territory to my satisfaction myself last week).
The blawgers don’t seem to have much to say today. Things are going a little better than they expected so the econbloggers are relatively silent. The tech blogs are dull. Even Boing Boing doesn’t have any particularly wonderful things up.
So what’s going on?
It’s the psychological landscape. Take two aspirins and link me in the morning. 🙂
Can’t speak for them, but the reason I haven’t been blogging is because I’ve been obsessed with Flickr. 🙂
Well not everyone is lethargic and disengaged. The Senate has been a bunch of busy bees.
A bit of news only you, Dave, and I will care about, I suppose. The Senators managed to produce a new pension bill that tightens funding rules along the lines of the Admin’s proposals, en fin! Airlines are of course given special treatment, which the WH has made veto noises about. Though it’s hard to imagine anything coming out of conference that doesn’t give some sort of relief to the airlines.
Now we’ll have to see how fast this pushes companies with legacy plans to rush to the exits. That’s the bit of future bad news that the Admin has studiously ignored with its otherwise sensible funding plans.
Oh, but first, we have to see what happens in the House, where the behind the scenes battles between Boehner and Thomas are surely good for a surprise or two. And then on to conference, where all bets are off unless Grassley and Boehner have already done a deal. Isn’t sausage-making fun?
ooooops, here’s the link to the story today from AP. Got a nice graph showing the funding shortfall trends. You may have noticed that PBGC created a big incentive for the Senators to get their act together yesterday by announcing more boxcar deficit numbers. Although I’m sure that the $22 billion is just the tip of the iceberg if the lessons from the S&L debacle hold.
Thanks, Nadezhda.
Since I’ve been predicting for the last twenty or more years that the defaults of various company pension systems would be the scandal of the Naughties and the Teens, I think that this is long overdue.
I believe that either the PBGC should be abolished or that it should be a genuine insurance plan in which premiums are proportional to risks. Presumably, that would bankrupt some companies. However, it seems wrong to me that people without pension plans should be financing the retirements of people who do but whose companies have defaulted on them.