Worried About Your Pension? Get A Job At The FSA

The UK regulator, the Financial Services Authority (FSA), has taken flak over its failure to anticipate the funding problems at the near-collapsed life and pensions assurer Equitable Life. So Equitable Life policyholders will be less than pleased to learn that they are also paying (in their other guise as taxpayers) to insulate FSA officials from similar funding problems at the FSA staff pension scheme. The FSA pension scheme is 50 million in deficit, but the taxpayers which fund the ever-growing army of bureaucrats and lawyers at the FSA are the one group of saves who can always top it up. The FSA budget, unveiled yesterday, states that another 2.5 million is going into it. And that ten times as much (200 million) will be spent on enforcement and catching wrongdoers. No wonder private sector pension funds are in deficit. Private sector employers are now spending so much time and money on ineffective regulations imposed by the FSA – whose only answer to regulatory failure is to up the dose – that they dont have time to do any real work any more.