Originally Posted by tomgoodman

And ironically, that was the fund's undoing. Had the money been invested in safe, low-yielding instruments (like government securities and AAA bonds), the company would have been forced to contribute more cash over the years in order to maintain full funding. The pension fund could have survived the market decline. But by choosing high-yield instruments, there was no need to add money during the "good years", and even if they wanted to do so, IRS limits on overfunding would have blocked them. So they spent this money on other things, and had none left when it was needed to replace the market losses.