Hacker News Reader

Were those retirement plans fully funded over their years of employment, or were they kicking the can down the road with "We'll make big retirement promises and in 30 years when the $XXX,XXX,XXX bill comes due it'll be someone else's problem"?

View on HN

I once saw an interesting research report comparing publicly traded companies based on their outstanding pension / retirement plan debt. The investment thesis was essentially advocating for shorting the companies with the largest under-funding of said plans, based on the assumption that a company that didn't give a crap about its employees probably wouldn't stand the test of time.

Maybe said underfunded pension funds should buy large leveraged short positions in their parent companies and cash out after announcing an impending pension shortfall.

This probably violates a bunch of SEC regulations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com