Three Years of Pension Returns Do Not Tell Us Much About Thirty Years

Pensions saw strong double-digit returns in the last years of the 90s. They had negative returns in the first years of the last decade. If anyone extrapolated from the last three years of the 90s and predicted double digit returns for the decades ahead or the first three years of the last decade and predicted flat or negative returns, they should have been taken far away from any position with any responsibility for pensions.

Unfortunately, the world does not work this way. Such absurd extrap...