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The U.S. government's pension insurer said yesterday that it opposed a deal to divvy up $7.3 billion left from the liquidation of Nortel Networks, potentially complicating efforts to end a seven-year battle over the cash, Reuters reported. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PBGC) said that it did not support an agreement reached on Wednesday because it would not receive the entire $708 million it says it is owed. The sale of Nortel's businesses raised billions of dollars, and Wednesday's agreement divided that cash among former Nortel businesses in Canada, the United States and Europe, ending years of cross-border court fights. The PBGC was not a party to the settlement, which is subject to court approval in the United States, Canada and other countries. The agency's claim stems from the termination of Nortel's underfunded pension plan in 2009, which at the time had 22,000 participants.

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) said that the dwindling town of Loyalton, Calif., had 30 days to hand over $1.6 million, more than its entire annual budget, to fund the pensions of its four retirees, the New York Times reported today. Otherwise, Loyalton stood to become the first place in California — perhaps in the nation — where a powerful state retirement system cut retirees’ pensions because their town was a deadbeat. Patsy Jardin kept Loyalton’s books for 29 years, and she retired in 2004 with an annual pension of about $48,000, but because of Loyalton’s troubles, CalPERS is threatening to cut that to about $19,000. Of all the states, experts say, California has the most protective pension laws and legal precedents. Once public workers join CalPERS, state courts have ruled, their employers must fund their pensions for the rest of their careers, even if the cost was severely underestimated at the outset — something that has happened in California and elsewhere. The showdown in Loyalton is raising the possibility that California’s pension promise is not absolute. There may be government backstops for bank failures, insurance collapses and pensions owed to workers by bankrupt airlines and steel mills — but not, apparently, for the retirees of a shrinking town.

A divided federal appeals court on Monday rejected claims by Detroit retirees that their pensions were unfairly cut to help the city end the largest U.S. municipal bankruptcy, Reuters reported today. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati said that restoring the pension cuts would "unavoidably" unravel Detroit's reorganization plan, which helped the city shed $7 billion of debt and end its 17-month bankruptcy in December 2014. "The harm to the city and its dependents — employees and stakeholders, agencies and businesses, and 685,000 residents — so outweighs the harm to these appellants that granting their requested relief and unraveling the plan would be impractical, imprudent, and therefore inequitable," Circuit Judge Alice Batchelder wrote in the opinion.

Still recovering from the July sniper attack that left five law enforcement officers dead, the Dallas Police Department is facing a new crisis as its pension fund approaches insolvency and scores of officers, including Chief David Brown, announce unexpected retirements, the Associated Press reported yesterday. The crisis comes as the Dallas Police Department negotiates with City Hall to raise pay and build its ranks, which union leaders say have been depleted by low pay and poor working conditions. There are currently 3,355 officers in a department that once had 3,600. Problems with the Dallas Police and Fire Pension system have been simmering for years and were coming to a head when the July 7 sniper attack temporarily united the city. But, in recent weeks, the pension crisis has boiled up again because of fears about the system's viability and pleas for calm from fund administrators. More than half of the system's $2.5 billion in assets are in deferred retirement funds, according to Kelly Gottschalk, who took over in 2015 after the fund's previous executive director resigned over the investment scandal.

General Motors and a union narrowly averted a strike by 3,900 Canadian workers today in a deal that the union hopes could serve as a model for preserving dwindling auto jobs in Canada, the New York Times reported. Under a tentative pact reached as a midnight deadline expired, GM will close one of two assembly lines at its Oshawa, Ontario, plant, its largest in Canada, according to Jerry Dias, the leader of Canada’s Unifor, the country’s largest private sector union. But the automaker agreed to rebuild another assembly line there to produce cars and trucks simultaneously, Dias said. As a result, he said, total employment will increase in Oshawa, which currently has about 5,700 total workers, including engineering and other nonunion employees.

The leader of the union representing auto workers in Canada said thousands of factory employees will strike at two General Motors Co. plants if the sides miss a Monday night deadline for a new contract, threatening to disrupt the supply of engines that go into the company’s sport-utility vehicles, the Wall Street Journal reported today. GM’s production of finished vehicles in Canada represents only a modest slice of the company’s sprawling manufacturing footprint in North America, but a strike would affect an engine and transmission plant in St. Catharines, Ontario, near Niagara Falls. That factory cranked out more than a half-million engines last year, delivering power for 15 percent of the vehicles GM sold in the U.S. last year, making the facility a potential choke point if production were suspended long enough.

California Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation requiring public pension funds to disclose more about the fees that private equity firms charge to manage the funds’ money, Bloomberg News reported on Friday. State officials hailed the law, approved by the governor on Wednesday, as an advance in transparency. The public will now know not only how much big pension funds like the California Public Employees’ Retirement System and California State Teachers’ Retirement System are paying private equity firms to manage their investments, but also learn more about how much they’re paying for performance. The public will also get a partial look at the fees private equity firms collect from the companies they buy out.

Corporate pension plans muddled through August as flat stock markets and tightening credit spreads kept plans from making up ground lost this year, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. The funded status of companies in the S&P 500 declined last month to 76.7 percent from 77.6 percent, according to consulting firm, Aon Hewitt. Pension assets returned 0.10 percent for the month and interest rates fell, which pushed down funding levels, said Aon. The present-day value of future pension obligations rises when interest rates fall. For the year, the combined pension deficit increased $138 billion, said Aon. Liabilities grew to $219 billion for the first eight months of the year, and asset growth of $81 billion wasn’t able to keep pace.