Bank Superintendency

The deepening financial crisis in the world has had in vilo above all to whom we are linked to longer private pension funds are voluntary or with some solidarity on the part of the State contribution. Sure, in Colombia the thing is not so serious as in the United States, but faced with such tremendous financial situation the risk is latent, without this implying a red alert, even more if you consider the worrisome news from January 2008, when the Bank Superintendency reported that the sistema de pensiones y cesantias had losses by more than 2 billion pesos and the of recently when the same entity announced that as a result the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers was affected at least to five funds of pension administrators (AFP) amounting to nearly 55,000 billion pesos and that such losses could be reflected in upcoming extracts that savers receive. When one reads stuff like that it cannot but worry will. But with all the information that we have, starting with the extracts of our individual account of pension and severance pay and ending with promising explanations from the Minister of finance, I am convinced we should not alarm us, at least for now. We are not in the situation of the contributors in the United States, Mexico, Chile or Argentina, especially those that make it in the voluntary plans in the USA), which have been seen to vanish in a moment your extra money through the huge trap of the collapse in the stock market indicators. Backdrop here than in the only case of USA, public and private pension funds and the private accounts of workers – calls 401 (k) retirement – have lost nearly 30 percent of its value in the last year! Therefore, as the Superintendent, said the impact of the latest loss of 55 billion is minimal (losses of the first months of the year already had recovered for the month of April) compared to the overall volume of the investment portfolio that handle the managers of pension funds which is of 57 billion pesos and, have also made much of the investments of these entities in insurance papers and not in toxic papers from abroad as it happened in countries that we listed above. For example, only to reassure us with the comparison, in Chile, according to the CENDA report, September 21, 2008, losses reached 20 billion dollars, is to say something like 44 billion pesos! All these reasons lead us to conclude that by now our pensioncita does not run higher risks, but that before the shocking proportions which have reached losses of regard systems in many countries of the world must demand much more control, much more regulation and many more guarantees on the part of the Colombian State to ensure all contributors countertops with which may subsist until his death, to such an extent in the discussion include the possibility of returning to a completely public pension system.