For more than 20 years now, we’ve been warning the investment man-agement and consulting communities that the defined benefit (DB) pension cow they’ve been milking has been getting skinnier and skinnier.

The widespread global adoption of defined contribution (DC) plans and the attendant freezing and/or termination of DB plans has been a gradual, ongoing process — like a frog who finds himself slowly boiling in water, it may not feel very threatening until it’s too late. To cite some statistics, according to the US Department of Labor, in 1975 103,346 DB pension plans were being offered to employ-ees of public and private US organisations, along with 207,748 DC plans. However, DB plans controlled nearly $186 billion (€165 billion) in total assets, while DC plans controlled some $75 billion (€66 billion), less than 29 percent of pension fund assets.

Over the next 45 years, however, the number of DB plans shrank considerably, and contribution growth in DC far