Against the grain

By any standards, $4 trillion (£2.5 trillion) dollars is a lot of money. And it represents just the losses incurred by pension systems within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development within the first 10 months of 2008. According to Gregor Impavido and Ian Tower, technical specialists at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), this translates to an average 20% loss of assets in nominal – and 22% in real – terms.

According to their paper, How the Financial Crisis Affects Pensions