March 11, 2021
Mike Clark, Consulting Actuary, the Principal Financial Group

I was watching a classic Monty Python movie to kill time while Congress deliberated on a fourth round of single-employer pension funding reform.  A soliloquy by one of the characters (aptly named “King of the Swamp Castle”) caught my attention as a perfect metaphor for Washington’s repeated…

January 20, 2021
Mike Clark, Consulting Actuary, the Principal Financial Group

If asked to summarize the year 2020 in a single adjective, the one most people would select is “unprecedented”.  (At least that’s the first one that would be printable in a pension blog.) When you consider that last year included a pandemic, social unrest, political turmoil, economic…