Charles Millard's Devastating Term "Insuring" Nation's Pensions, By The Numbers

Moe Tkacik | May 15, 2009, 2:09PM

We just told you about the probes underway of Charlie Millard, the obscure Bush-appointed former director of the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, which provides a form of limited bankruptcy insurance to the retirement funds of 44 million Americans. Millard's aggressive plan to sell off most of the PBGC's bonds and plow the majority of its funds into stocks and real estate has been a pension world controversy since he started at the agency in May 2007, at the beginning of the credit crunch. Even by the highly imperfect standards of conventional Wall Street wisdom, the former Lehman Brothers executive's investment strategy appeared almost gratuitously risky.

But it wasn't until the Office of the Inspector General began sniffing around the agency that Millard's short-lived stint in the federal government began to take on a more sinister light. We've boiled down the draft report of their audit, released yesterday by Congress, to a few key figures, adding a few of our own for perspective.