PARIS (AFP) – Pension funds have recovered from the darkest days of the financial crisis, clawing back more than 80 percent of the value lost in 2008, the OECD said this week.
But sluggish growth in developed countries, and the added drag of debt crises in the eurozone and the United States, pose a threat to the health of funds built up by people contributing to, or drawing from, private pension schemes.
Conditions on sovereign debt markets, and also stock markets, are critically important to pension funds, as to most other sectors of the investment fund industry, because most of their savers’ funds are invested in bonds and stocks.
“Having weathered the financial crisis, pension fund asset levels in most countries continued to show strong growth throughout 2010,” the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development said.
But the outlook for future economic growth in developed economies is “uncertain and sluggish,” and pension funds could
Read More from the Article Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/business/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110731/bs_afp/oecdpensionsretirementinvestment
