16 II. THE STATE OF OUR PENSION FUNDS pension assets were $880 billion and the retirement fund pension liabilities were over $1.8 trillion. The $880 billion of pension assets is often referred to as a “pension trust fund.” Agency employers and agency employees underfunded the retirement fund every year, for decades. This resulted in an unfunded pension liability of nearly $1 trillion. There- fore, the US Treasury Department’s General Revenues rescued the retirement fund every year, for at least 30 years. The rescue money is often referred to as a: subsidy, supplemental payment, transfer-in, or a bailout. The Official Monetary and Financial Institu- tions Forum (OMFIF) is a public think tank based in London and Singapore that tracks global investment by public investors, specifi- cally the largest 750 public pension funds, cen- tral banks and sovereign wealth funds. Their report for US federal pension fund assets at the end of 2016 showed $600.6 billion for the US Military Retirement Fund, $557.9 billion for the Federal Employees Retirement Systems, $480.4 for the Thrift Saving Plan and $322.9 for Civil Service Retirement. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) is a US government agency created by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA). The PBGC provides a backstop for the retirement incomes of 40 million American workers in nearly 24,000 private sector defined benefit pension plans. The PBGC, just like the FDIC in the banking sector, is funded by insurance premiums paid by employers that sponsor insured pension plans, and PBGC also receives funds from the various defunct pension plans it takes over. In the same way that the FDIC steps in to provide some relief to financial institution customers when their bank, savings and loan or thrift fails, the PBGC steps in to help those retirees counting on a pension income after their employer defaults and disappears due to insolvency. However, although they are some- what protected by PBGC, pensioners often receive 50 cents or less on the dollar relative to what they would have received if their previous employer didn’t go insolvent. In 2016, PBGC paid for monthly retirement benefits for nearly 840,000 retirees in more than 4,700 sin- gle-employer and multiemployer pension plans that cannot pay promised benefits. Including those who have not yet retired and participants in multiemployer plans receiving financial as- sistance, PBGC is currently responsible for the pensions of approximately 1.5 million people. From all available data, it appears that the underfunded ratio is rising on defined bene- fit plans in the United States in recent years despite an unprecedented rise of the US equity market over the same period. Due to rising underfunded ratios and the dumping of pen- sion plans by companies who can’t meet their long-standing pension obligations using the protection of reorganization and bankruptcy laws, there are serious questions as to the PB- GC’s ability to meet current and anticipated future pension obligations, whether or not tax- payers are called upon to provide even further funding toward them. Putting the size of total US pension fund assets into context, it helps to compare them to the market capitalization of the stock and bond markets. As of the end of 2014, the US stock market was approximately $26 trillion and the US bond market was approximately $40 trillion. Recent estimates of the global stock market capitalization are approaching $80 trillion with the US stock market approaching $30 trillion. As sovereign debt has ballooned since 2008, it has become increasingly difficult to find reliable estimates of total bond market capitalization, but a reasonable guestimate is that it has grown from $100 trillion cited by Bloomberg in 2016. When you compare total US-funded pension fund assets of $25 trillion to both global and US stock and bond market capitalization, it is clear that US pension funds are a significant financial market participant.