"1.Government has too much debt to issue more debt
2.Government nationalizes private pension funds making their debt holdings an "asset" and commingles with other public assets
3.New confiscated assets net out sovereign debt liability, lowering the debt/GDP ratio
4.Debt/GDP drops below threshold, government can issue more sovereign debt"
zerohedge.com/news/2013-09-06/poland-confiscates-half-private-pension-funds-cut-sovereign-debt-load
now is that what is in store for every privet pension plan around the world, are we here to kiss our 401k plans goodbye?
It would help if you actually gave credible links about this story.
These aren't "private" pensions at all, because the Polish system was never truly private. People haven't lost anything as such, and it's pretty obvious that the way that the Polish system was designed (having a public component alongside a component that was managed by private funds but was in reality highly controlled by the State) was unworkable in the long run.
What's actually happened is that these "private" pensions have become a huge rope around the government's neck. The system at the time was quite revolutionary, but it proved to be unworkable in practice. When such a large proportion of public debt is to companies that were getting - more or less - free money from the Government, then it's obvious that it couldn't work in the long run.
