Madam Speaker, I want to note that the market value of retirement savings held in employer-sponsored pension funds declined by $58.1 billion, or 6.7%, during the fourth quarter of 2008 to $810 billion. This was attributable mainly to a fall in the market value of stocks and equity funds, which, by the way, we would not have if they were in GICs and fixed-income funds. The drop followed a decrease of $82.7 billion in the third quarter, which is the largest quarterly decline in a decade.
In my own portfolio, which is somewhat smaller than the numbers that I am indicating here, I have an absolute increase. I have zero losses because of the meltdown last year, only because I resisted the urge to invest in equities over the last seven or eight years, although I was chased around by lots of salespeople whose duty, they thought, was to try to encourage people.
I think what we have here is a retail market that catches fire and feeds on itself. People who have interest in making money out of these funds, because it is all about making money, will go to people and say, “Your fund is not doing well because you have been sticking with GICs all these years. Look at the other funds that are getting ahead of you. You have to hire me, the manager, who will get you into all kinds of fancy financial instruments that will make up for what you supposedly have lost”. In reality, they have not lost anything, because at the end of the day when the market crashes, the fund that was high comes down to a low point.
One can play around with private funds but not with--