Reuters – Pension Underfunding Grows

The gap between what major corporations will owe retired workers and how much they have put aside grew last year despite a strong stock market rally, according to a study set to be released on Monday by Wilshire Associates. The cumulative liability among defined benefit pension plans sponsored by companies in the benchmark Standard and Poor's 500 index increased to $1.56 trillion in 2012 from $1.38 trillion the year before, outpacing the growth in assets. As a result, the overall funding ratio - a measure of a plan's assets divided by its commitments - for all plans fell from 79.7 percent to 78.1 percent, the study found.

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