Some pension specialists worry that if U.P.S. succeeds with the Teamster plans, it could provide a blueprint for other companies looking to escape pooled pension obligations, in other industries where a few large, successful companies subsidize many small, weak ones.
For that matter, if you pooled the obligations of every employer in the country, no company would go bankrupt just because it happened to employ older people, or it happened to have been around for a while, or it happened to have made the transformation from open-hearth furnaces and ingot-making to basic oxygen furnaces and continuous casting.
The idea of pooling obligations was raised at the start of Europe's rolling debt crisis in 2009 and gained support among some economists.
Typically the municipal obligations are pooled and financed in collateralized debt obligation (CDO) vehicles, where the asset default risk is benchmarked as the weighted average rating and term of the contributing municipalities.
A year after Kromah bought her home, Cohen's hedge fund created a $510 million trust called a collateralized debt obligation that pooled Kromah's loan with thousands of others.
Increasingly, they are being pooled into collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), another form of investment vehicle that is growing as fast as a hedge-fund manager's bank balance.Such products, known as "structured credit", encourage liquidity, partly because they can be created out of thin air.
None of the experimental measures in the controls differed significantly between the three survival times (ANOVA, P > 0.05), so to meet obligations to minimize animal numbers we pooled them for subsequent analyses.
As the housing market inflated, banks pooled mortgages, many of them to shaky borrowers, and packaged them into complex collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.'s.
Banks and other financial institutions pooled those asset-backed securities into new units, dividing them up again and issuing securities against them, creating collateralized debt obligations.
Here's my suggestion: Require that the rating of any securitized pool of obligations not exceed the rating of the least creditworthy party, unless the pool is subject to a letter of credit, insurance or other form of credit enhancement.
It is governments who provide the means through which we express our social obligations and pool our risks.
