sayingoug henwood is pension fund reliance on wall street is a problem. i want to read an excerpt from your piece and talk to you on the other side of that. you write that governments have promised joins of dollars to present and future -- billions of dollars to present and future retirees. host: you paint a very grim picture here. how did we get here? we were doing fairly well into the early part of the 2000's. the bull market of the late 1990's made a lot of pension funds look very healthy. those high returns we got spoiled people. we had two very good decades in the stock market, the 80's and 90's, so people started thinking the stock market is a perpetual money machine. with the recession of the early 2000's and the recent recession said maybevernments we do not have to contribute as much. it is always an easy way to balance a budget by cutting back on pension contributions. you don't have to worry about cutting taxes or cutting services so it is an easy way to kick the can down the road. the pension funds took a big hit during the financial crisis of