How bad is the pension fund issue. Is it a crisis as the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) claims? Or is the American Benefits Council right when they say the problems are blown out of proportion? And depending on your assumptions, they could both be right. Examining this debate will provide a useful springboard as we examine retirement issues you may be facing.

But first, last week I promised a special announcement. Ready to ship and in a bookstore near you is my new book called Just One Thing. Some of you may have received an email yesterday about the book, and a lot of you ordered, because it is now #4 on Amazon in less than 24 hours! Permit me to make a few personal observations about the book and the publishing process.

This week we will look with fresh eyes at an old problem: US pension funds, both public and private, are under-funded, and the situation is getting worse. And the US taxpayer is going to get to fund the difference. The recent slew of data on pension funds suggests that little is being done to correct the huge and mounting problems I have written about for years. Even the recent market upturns of the past few years have not been as big a help as it should have been. I wrote this over two years ago:

This week we start out with the weather and end up buried in the footnotes of the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation as we wonder about expected future returns from the stock market. It is a wide-ranging foray, and I hope an interesting one, as we look at what some see as an impending crisis (which is not all that big, as world ending crises go) and stumble upon the real object where our concern should be focused - our retirement portfolios.

Getting an "A" in College

But first, I noted that my book, Bull's Eye Investing, rose to #19 on Amazon over the weekend (#1 on the finance list), and remains a quite strong 94 as I write this evening. If you have not yet gotten what the New York Times called "serious summer reading," perhaps the comments by readers will help you stop your procrastination. One reader evens speculates on Amazon.com that it could improve your kid's grades. Here is his assessment:

Earlier this year I wrote that the deduction of option expenses and proper accounting for pension liabilities would become an issue, and that it was highly likely that when new accounting standards are adopted that these would be addressed. If so, then it would be a large drag upon future corporate earnings. These new accounting standards are going to create a glass ceiling, if you will, over the stock market.