Dallas

Submitted by Michael Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

The Dallas Police and Fire Pension plan is severely underfunded. Not even a $1.1 billion taxpayer bailout the plan officials request will make the plan whole.

Discussion of a possible freeze in lump sum payments led to a run on withdrawals. The board still has not suspended lump sum payouts.

On Saturday, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings proposed targeting those who got rich from the system. This is sure to accelerate the run on assets via lump sum withdrawals.

We've written several times over the past couple of months about the epic meltdown of the the Dallas Police and Firefighters Pension (DPFP) (see here, here and here for background).  It all started when the Pension Board discovered that one of their real estate managers had been consistently overmarking illiquid real estate investments.  That discovery resulted in an FBI investigation of the manager and a $1BN write down for the DPFP.  In the wake of the writedowns, Dallas policemen and firefighters rushed for the exits and withdrew over $500mm in assets. 

A few months ago we wrote that the Dallas Police and Fire Pension Fund was on the verge of collapse after a series of shady real estate investments resulted in massive markdowns of pension assets, the ouster of the fund's CIO and an FBI raid of it's largest real estate investment manager (see "Dallas Cops' Pension Fund Nears Insolvency In Wake Of Shady Real Estate Deals, FBI Raid").  We summed up the fund's dilemma as follows:  

Archbishop Dmitri of Dallas (1923-2011)

Above is an image taken today of the incorrupt body of Archbishop Dmitri of Dallas. He died in the summer of 2011, and was buried unembalmed, according to Orthodox tradition. On Friday his body was disinterred for transferral to his new tomb in St. Seraphim Orthodox Cathedral in Dallas, which was his own. When the cemetery personnel opened his coffin, they found Vladyka Dmitri incorrupt.