A crime in slow motion or how to end public pensions once and for all

• By  Tomalaprensa ,  tomalaprensa.es
• See original
• January 14, 2018
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Banks and insurers work to transfer the huge savings of the Spanish population to the private sector.

// Arte El Salto

Every crime has a mobile. 

To discover it and, incidentally, unmask those responsible, you just have to follow the money trail. In this case, it is difficult to find a more attractive booty. 

In Spain, the current private pension plans have saved 109,244 million euros, one tenth of GDP.

An amount that represents, however, a minuscule sample of what could be the business of pensions for large banks and insurers if their main competitor disappears: public pensions. 

They have already done it in many Latin American countries. Now they want to finish the work started in Spain.

The strategy used by the lobbies of the pension plans can not be older: to convince that the public system has no future, and to guarantee that it does not have it, leaving it without resources, so that the first forecast is fulfilled.

The tale of the lobby

Or how they convince you that public pensions are not a good idea

Lobbies and think tanks of banks and insurers, owners of most pension plans, have become the reference when describing the future of public pensions. And also when influencing the laws that define their future. 

A figure that serves as an example of the link between private pension funds and the future of the public system is Rafael Doménech, deputy director of the Economic Office of the President of the Government with José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and current head of macroeconomic analysis at BBVA, leading entity the market for private pensions in Spain and a good part of Latin America.

In 2013, Doménech was selected by the Government of Mariano Rajoy as one of the 12 'wise men' who defined the so-called 'sustainability factor', that is, how much pensions will be cut from 2019 to compensate that we will live longer. 

Among the dozen experts, most were linked to banks or insurers and only three had a vision different from that of the Government. 

It is also the case of the president of this commission, Víctor Pérez-Díaz, linked to FAES, the Caixa Galicia Foundation or Unespa, the employers' association of insurers. Currently, in Congress it is said that Doménech spends more time there than some ministers.

The strategy of the lobbies consists of convincing that the public system has no future and doing everything possible so that it does not have it

Through think tanks such as Civismo, Fedea or IEE -the CEOE study group-, through 'white' web pages, sponsored content, study cabinets, surveys, seminars and media talk shows, the pension lobby private defends its main thesis: before the persistence of the crisis and the aging of the population, you must increase the retirement age, cut benefits and bet on alternative ways of saving, that is, by private pension plans.

These pressure groups have also done the impossible, with good results so far, to keep the proposal of financing pensions out of the political agenda by other means, through the general budgets of the State, as with other social expenditures and in other European countries. 

The other option defended by various social sectors to ensure the future of public pensions-increasing salaries or contributions by companies-remains even more relegated by the lobby that wants to leave you without a pension - and that you have to hire another with a Private fund, if you can afford it.

The self-fulfilling prophecy

Or how they make the end of the public system a reality

It is not enough to scare, but it helps. The news that 2016 had ended with the largest deficit in the history of Social Security - some 19,000 million - gave good headlines to the private pension lobby. 

The "looting", as the Pensioner Tide calls it, comes from afar.

In the year 2000, the budget surplus, the Government of José María Aznar created the so-called 'pension piggy bank', a security fund in anticipation of worse times. 

To prevent future misuses, the Government set a 3% limit on what could be available in case of need.

In 2012, the reserve fund reached its maximum, with 65,000 million euros. That year, the same year in which Luis de Guindos announced the bank bailout for an equivalent sum, President Mariano Rajoy suspended that limit and decreed that the Government could henceforth dispose of this fund, with no other formality than a prior notice to Congress.

Since then, the PP Government has withdrawn an average of 13,500 million euros each year. 

In December of 2017 there were only 8,000 million left, just enough to pay one more month. The main cause of this deficit in the coffers of Social Security is the increase in spending on pensions due to the aging of the population. 

A factor almost as decisive as the fall in income from social contributions, with which the entire public system is financed, a phenomenon easily explained by the crisis, unemployment and the more than two million people who had to leave the country For economical reasons. 

Nor has it helped that the "recovery" of which the Government speaks has been based on low wages, with an average fall of 12.8%, and on precarious employment, with twice as many temporary contracts as in 1995.

The defense platforms of the public system defend that what is in crisis is the Pact of Toledo, signed in 1995, not public pensions. 

"It is a lie that there is some reason to pay pensions with contributions," says Ignacio Zubiri, Professor of Public Finance at the University of the Basque Country. 

The economist Elena Idoate criticizes the exceptionality of public pensions since the Taifa economic seminar: "There is no other budget item that is linked to a certain source of funding. 

Why is the budget balance of pensions, and not the Monarchy, the Army or the Police?

// Arte El Salto

Let die

Or how they get you to go to the private system does not seem so bad idea

Since the beginning of the crisis, the lobby of the pension plans embedded in the Government has found an ideal ally in the European Commission. Faced with the gap between the expenses and income of Social Security, the recipe of successive governments has been to cut benefits and lengthen the working time necessary to access a pension instead of addressing the fall in revenues of the public system with redistributive policies .

In 2010, the ultimatum of the European institutions to the Zapatero government led to the freezing of contributory pensions and, a year later, to the Social Security reform law, which delayed the retirement age from 65 to 67 years, between a battery of measures that made it much more difficult to access a pension or charge the maximum pension.

In 2013, Rajoy made things even more difficult with Royal Decree 5/2013, which toughened the conditions for access to early retirement. And for those who already received a pension, the PP guaranteed that same year, through Law 23/2013, a constant decline in its purchasing power by decoupling the update of pensions from inflation.

Thanks to the pension reforms carried out by Zapatero and Rajoy in 2011 and 2013, pensioners have lost 1,200 million euros in 2017 alone, an average of 200 euros for each one of them. 

The introduction of the sustainability factor from 2019 will mean that "less will be charged per month but for more years," says one of the BBVA pension websites. 

After comparing the systems of all European countries in his report Pensions in Spain, Professor Zubiri concludes that the PP "has introduced some of the most severe aging adjustments in the EU". The employer's think tank, the IEE, recommended a year ago to increase the retirement age to 70 years to "save" pensions. 

If the pension plans were what counts the communication apparatus of the bank and insurers, switching to one of those funds may not be such a bad idea. That's the problem.

The final trick

Or how they do not talk about the crisis of pension plans

The Argentine case is revealing. In 1994, with the recommendation of the IMF and the World Bank, the government of Carlos Menem promoted the privatization of the pension system, following the Chilean model, the same model that is now used as an example in Spain. 

One of the three entities most benefited by this operation was the subsidiary of BBVA, Consolidar, which remained with 14.1% of the market. 

A business with great advantages for the Spanish bank: once inside, the law prevented you from returning to the public system.

In 2008, the Argentine government nationalized pension funds against the bankruptcy risk of a system that had invested 1,059 million euros in futures markets, on the threshold of the biggest financial crisis since 1929. Some "casino bets" -according to the sociologist Sergio Fiscella- where the savers had the obligation to continue gambling.

The pension lobby in Spain has managed to focus debates on the "unsustainability" of the public system, ignoring the lack of guarantees and the serious crisis that private pension plans are going through, according to the economic press.

Far from what it may seem, private pensions are not exactly a buoyant business. The newspaper  Cinco Días placed the "golden age" of pension plans between 1997 and the beginning of the crisis. With a loss of 580 million euros, 2017 has become the first year in which more withdrawals are produced than contributions in the private system. Jesús González, one of UGT's top social security experts, described in this newspaper the format of the pension plans for "moribund" and "catatonic".

To the rescue comes the Government of Rajoy, which is currently preparing a reform of the regulation of pension plans and funds that will reduce the commissions that have to pay savers and provides facilities to withdraw money at ten years, something that can only be done now in exceptional cases. 

An operation interpreted by financial analysts as an attempt to increase the attractiveness of private pension plans, especially for the younger public. 

In other words, while the injured person is bleeding, instead of covering the wound, the doctor extracts more blood.

For the CGT union, the "premeditated and methodical bankruptcy" of Social Security and the public pension system by all the governing parties since 1980 and "for almost the entire parliamentary period since 1995" has a goal "not at all hidden" : deliver to private markets 45% of the social expenditure item that is currently dedicated to public pensions. A crime in slow motion, live and direct, without spoilers, whose descenlance is still open