The End of DB Pensions

GM’s decision to transfer some $26 billion of defined benefit liabilities to Prudential was ripe with portent—and irony. America’s quintessential defined benefit plan, and one of the industry’s most sophisticated actors, had determined that the risk of managing its outsized liability had risen to an unpalatable level. From that very moment, the question for many large corporate plan sponsors was no longer if to embrace pension risk transfer, but when.