18 concentrated this large capital pool to provide stable, cheap financing to build this multi- national juggernaut and the national security state. The problem with the boomers’ retire- ment is, not only will they stop adding capital but, also, they are going to want their money back to pay for retirement. This is a “$2 prob- lem.” Boomers are not going to put in a new dollar – that’s a $1 problem. And, they will want to take a dollar out which results in a $2 problem. If you listen to my many presentations on the financial coup d’état, I think that the G-7 leadership saw the boomer retirements coming and said, “We have to pull capital out of these systems before the boomer retirement comes due. Then when the boomer retirements come due, we’ll stuff their pension funds full of obligations, such as mortgage-backed securities on their homes or treasury securities on their economy. We’ll bubble the economy and stick the paper in their pension funds. They can come up with a fiscally responsible solution. They can stew in their own juices.” If you look at the history of pension funds, I don’t see it as something that the country wanted to do for the working population; I think that it was something they used to attract the working population into a certain kind of job and relationship, but the real goal was to concentrate cash flow and control to ensure that the national security state and its corporations had the lowest cost of capital in the global markets. The last thing they wanted to do was return that capital and cash flow. When the boomers retire, the question was how to overcome the “$2 problem.” I think the answer was the financial coup d’état – shift enough capital out of existing institutions so that the boomer retirements could not pinch the financing of the national security state and the multinational banks and corporations that operate it. V. RECENT GLOBAL AND US PENSION FUND PERFORMANCE The chart and table on the next page show the investment returns of various market indices, pension funds and educational endowments over the 10-year period beginning in 2007 and ending in 2016. The top chart shows the overall average during this 10-year time period. The table provides the detailed data for all years with footnotes explaining the sources. Going left to right in the chart, the first three purple bars show a benchmark for comparison to fund returns. The first is the “Barclays Ag- gregate Bond Fund” which represents bonds that have been historically considered a stable investment but have lower returns. This has been the case as interest rates dropped steadily between 1980-2016. The second is the “S&P 500 Index with Dividends,” which represents the returns for a common index of the US stock market. As most pension funds have a blended allocation consisting of both stocks and bonds, the third is a “40/60 Portfolio,” and it represents a blended approach. It as- sumes a hypothetical investment profile where 40% is invested in the Barclays Aggregate Bond Fund and 60% is invested in the S&P 500 Index with Dividends. This ignores the likelihood that pension funds can be expected to have a portion of their assets in cash, global stocks, land and real estate and alternative investments. II. THE STATE OF OUR PENSION FUNDS