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Comment by bolololo12 | Hacker News Reader

Not a smaller scandal was former Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk (now President of the European Council) reform to move money saved on privately owned pension accounts called OFE (OFE invested peoples money into obligations and bonds) to the public pension system - circa 151 billion PLN, so around 40 billion USD.

link: http://www.money.pl/gospodarka/raporty/artykul/skok;na;pieni...

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I don't want to start a political dispute over here, but the private pension funds scheme is a theft by itself. The country transfers money over to these pension funds, and by doing that it raises it's own debt. Now it has to sell bonds to cover that debt. That bonds are being bought by the very same funds. Country will have to buy them back, but with a loss. In the end: the profit on that pension funds is, in fact, funded by the citizens themselves. The only beneficiaries are the funds themselves, as they got the margins, and take a some sickly huge commission.

In short: it was an unpopular but wise decision by the former Polish gov to stop this scam. I believe that the current government is going further into that direction. Also a good move.

government pension funds are not a smaller scam. Enough to say they constantly raise the age at which you can start collecting your pensions and return you small % before you die. So privately owned funds, even if they have massive commissions, still return back more than the government.

The government introduced this type of investing in Poland in the reform in 1999 and in 2014 just didn't buy back obligations which were bought using peoples money.

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