Pension Dumping: The Reasons, the Wreckage, the Stakes for Wall Street.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Bookshelf - Brief article - Book review

Pension Dumping: The Reasons, the Wreckage, the Stakes for Wall Street. By Fran Hawthorne. Bloomberg, 231 pages. $27.95.

We've come a long way in the past couple of generations from the expectations of a retirement ceremony, a gold watch and a pension. As Fran Hawthorne details, defined-benefit pension plans are now the exception rather than the rule in American business. Where they do exist, they have become a beguiling target for companies to "dump," especially when the companies skitter near bankruptcy.

In a chapter entitled "The Signs of Failure," Hawthorne, a veteran financial journalist and author, notes that underfunding the pension plan itself is rarely the cause of a bankruptcy. It's usually because the business (and the industry itself) is in serious trouble, whether that's a matter of having old technology, losing out to foreign rivals or other problems.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

But that hasn't stopped companies from pleading their case with the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PBGC), the government agency...