Meanwhile, the 62% stake in Barclays Africa, previously advertised as a growth business for decades to come, will be sold down (at the bottom of the market, probably) because today's regulators are strict about how they calculate liabilities.
They calculate "liabilities" by discounting pension cash flows using the expected returns on risky plan assets (presently in excess of 7%).
Currently, many public pension plans use the same rate - often 7.5percentto8.25percentcent - for the assumed investment rate of return and the discount rate used to calculate liabilities.
"There was a period of about a year where the T.S.A. and airlines were involved in very serious negotiations" to work out a formula for calculating liability, said Diana Cronin, a spokeswoman for the Air Transport Association.
What's more, the way the PPF calculates liabilities means the bailout is likely to be closer to £200m to £300m, not the £571m quoted as the "hole" in the BHS fund.
When state and local governments go looking for a new pension actuary, they sometimes post ads saying that candidates who favor new ways of calculating liabilities need not apply.
Simulations are carried out using TAXSIM - the NBER's model for calculating liabilities under US Federal and State income tax laws from individual data - and EUROMOD, a static tax-benefit model for 19 EU countries, which was designed for comparative analysis4.
And it doesn't help that through the years Congress has granted a boatload of loopholes and funding holidays for sponsors, as it did last year in April Fools' Day legislation that changed the formula for calculating liabilities, effectively slashing the levels where many sponsors were required to fund their plans.
Most regulatory authorities have a process for calculating liabilities and thus have a way to determine bond amounts for a given property based on site factors and the nature of the disturbance and the jurisdiction's environmental and land use requirements.
The Illinois pension system, which was only 46percentt funded, would run out of cash by 2018, according to the research, which uses June 2009 financial statements and calculates liabilities using the U.S. Treasury bond rate.
