Many of us have grown up with Jon Spain at GAD. I remember walking into him as he walked bare foot down a corridor in that most actuarial of Treasury outposts!

Jon Spain

Jon is a deep thinker and one who has been mulling the issues of pension funding for many decades. We can pretend that the matters he considers are of no consequence but that is because we have veered away from pensions into savings and forgotten the basics.

So when I got this note from Jon following his attendance of our recent social in the Albion , I took some notice.

I’m a former DB consulting actuary who’s worked in both the private sector and the public sector. Although I jused to think that the DB funding problem was created by the shift to mark to market around 25 years ago, I realised around 12 years ago that the problem was far deeper, namely the use of a discount rate process. My website (discrate.com) was set up in 2015 and I’ve been extending it ever since.

Jon Spain

I have been on Jon’s website and want to hear more. We will have him on the Pension PlayPen next Tuesday at 10.30 am , a free link to hear him talk and converse is at the bottom.

Here is his call to speak , as he spells it out on his introduction to his website

In the past, I have refrained from criticising either scheme actuaries or the pensions regulator, suggesting that the problem is just the framework within which they are forced to operate. However, I now believe that, together, the actuaries and the pensions regulator are responsible for having invented and then presided over a morass of regulations which don’t work. One of the factors that changed my mind was the manner in which the 2022 LDI debacle was greeted, as if there was no problem.

Your free link is below

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Jon Spain