That's interesting. So as you say, company pensions schemes being administered by highly paid professionals on behalf of the trustees of company pensions schemes are unable, for some unaccountable reason, to provide the pensions which those schemes were expressly designed to provide.
Instead of which, according to you, private individuals without the resources to employ the sort of highly paid professionals working on behalf of company schemes - should somehow find some tax efficient and foolproof means of providing for their own retirement in some way.
Which of course conveniently overlooks the real reason apart from straightforward criminality (Maxwell) and downright greed (Philip Green) for the failure of Company Schemes. Which is the prioritising of short term shareholder value - as reflected in headline grabbing annual profits and dividend payments which make the headlines - over the level of contributions to Company Pensions which would be necessary but not legally required to maintain their viability. Something which never made the headlines. of course, until it was to late
And before you jump out of your pram over Gordon Brown's abolition of tax credits on dividends in the 1997 Budget(which impacted on pension funds); this was only thought necessary in the first place because of companies prioritising short term shareholder value (again) by paying high dividends over investing profits back into their companies for the longer term. Short- termism at its worst. Whereas had they re-invested those dividends, profitability would have increased even further in the longer term which would have been reflected in higher share prices. To repeat "in the longer term". Trends in which, pensions funds of all people should supposedly be in the best position to take advantage of. Instead of which incompetent and bone idle fund managers were happy to sit back and rely on short term share dividends rather than doing the job they were being paid to do. Although of course its a lot easier to blame Gordon Brown for their lack of foresight.
Of course you have. With the usual distinct absence of real evidence that you actually understand anything that you're suppose to be talking about
To wit:
The only reason someone such as yourself could ever regard "index linked" schemes as "gold plated" is presumably because you're suffering from the delusion that indexes, the FTSE 100, the FTSE All Share, the S&P 500, NASDAQ, the Dow etc can only ever go up, and never down.
michael adams
...